Help! I’m 49 and STILL can’t drive
AS I WALKED over to a fellow school-gate mum to thank her for dropping my children at football along with her own, I spotted her cold, disapproving look. Before I knew it she was telling me off as thoroughly as if I were a child myself.
‘Now look here,’ she began as other mothers and children looked on sheepishly, ‘I’m going to tell you something to your face that everyone else will only say behind your back. It’s high time you learned to drive and stopped relying on the rest of us to ferry your children around. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could share with the car-pooling once in a while?’
I was stunned. It was bad enough that she was criticising my inability to drive, but to think that my ineptitude was the subject of discussions among the other mums was awful. I managed to hold back the tears until my three boys and I had walked the 20 minutes home laden with sports kit, and then sobbed my eyes out.
I am the only mother in our community and probably in our county, who cannot drive. I knew I would have to do something about it. But it was not going to be easy.
Decades ago, aged 18, I was told by numerous driving instructors that I was not safe on the roads. I couldn’t steer straight or judge distance either side of the car.
During a year’s lessons, I consistently veered across the central line to the right side of the road, and only narrowly avoided accidents. I lost count of the times my instructors grabbed the wheel and pulled me up straight in the nick of time. When the last one tearfully begged my parents to cancel my course with the promise he’d refund all their money, since he was scared for his life, I resigned myself to a lifetime of public transport.
I managed without a car for three decades while living in London, but it was another story when we decamped to a village in the Shires. THERE’S
only one bus, which may or may not arrive at its designated time every three hours. With my children’s schools then a mile away from home in different directions and with busy roads to negotiate, walking was a nightmare.
my boys, aged seven, six and two at the time, resembled Dickensian characters as they trudged through ice and snow weighed down with book bags and pe kit, while I balanced a Bugaboo on impossibly narrow pavements.
every time a heavy vehicle passed I had to shove them into hedges, leaving them scratched and petrified. ‘Why can’t you drive, mummy?’ they would whinge as their friends waved from the back seats of passing 4x4s. my ten-year-old vowed to start saving up to buy his own car so that at least, by the time he was 17, he and his brothers wouldn’t be in the same mortifying predicament at secondary school.
When they all moved to the same school three years ago, they were able to take the bus, but that didn’t solve the problem of how to ferry them to sports clubs. The local taxi service was hit and miss depending on how patient the driver was feeling that day. Once they realised it was us again — they knew I’d insist on them parking in a safe place for ten minutes while I loaded the boot and strapped the children in the back – they thought better of it and took off for their next job. Often a parent would see us stranded outside school and kindly bundle us into their family seven-seater.
But this mother’s comment would change all that. I realised how bad it looked that I was always in the passenger seat, never at the wheel.
I always remember one ex-boyfriend’s remark when I asked him years ago why he didn’t drive. His reply ‘because I was born to be driven not to drive’, appalled me. But I now realised others must have had a similarly dim view of my apparent sense of entitlement.
It was clearly time to try again. I admit I was relieved when the first two driving schools I called felt they couldn’t take me on after I explained the hazardous nature of my past experiences. But one put me in contact with an instructor, who specialises in teaching nervous drivers. His last pass was a 92-year-old woman — I thought that boded well.
I had an awful sense of déjà vu as soon as I’d taken off the handbrake. I was still driving way over to the right and narrowly missing parked cars. In the first half hour my instructor had to take hold of the wheel three times.
He demonstrated my massive sense of disproportion by making me stop on a quiet road and telling him how much distance I thought I had on either side.
I believed I had just a few inches space on the left side and several metres on the right. When he opened the doors, I was flabbergasted to see that we were positioned three metres from the line of parked cars on the left and had just a few inches clear on the right.
He said: ‘In all my years of experience I haven’t encountered anything this bad. I don’t think this has anything to do with your eyesight. I think the problem is your brain.’
Since I don’t consider myself slowwitted, I felt mildly offended, but nonetheless thought he probably had a point. That same day I talked to Dr Harriet Allen who studies perception at the University of Nottingham and described to her my problem with driving. It was a lightbulb moment when she asked me if I automatically favoured the right side in other day-to-day activities.
I explained that yes, ever since I can remember I have veered to the right in an ungainly manner. I bump into the right side of doorways, collide into the right of aisle supermarket shelves, and unwittingly swim into other’s lanes at our local baths, causing pool-rage incidents.
As a child, I would involuntarily topple my dolls’ pram over kerbs, and as a new mother had to quickly swerve to avoid doing the same thing with my children’s prams.
Dr Allen suggested I look at something called pseudo-neglect as a possible explanation. It is the label given to people who focus more attention to one side of space.
Dr Allen explained: ‘If you give them a horizontal line split at the middle, typically people will tend to say the left side is longer than the right. Different people will do this to different degrees, but essentially the area you give lots of attention to will appear to expand. For some people, one side of space is attended to more, in your case the width of the road, thus causing errors in judgment in distance and size.’
I was interested to find diagrams linking the phenomenon to driving difficulties with participants using a driving simulator. The graphic viewpoint seemed to match my own through the windscreen. While it is doubtless inconvenient, especially when trying to drive straight, the phenomenon does not have severe consequences for everyday life, although other drivers I encounter might say otherwise.
BETWEEN
us, my driving instructor and I have found our own remedy. I put complete trust in him, doing exactly what he says ignoring what my brain is telling me. After some shaky starts, I have retrained my brain to know that when objects on the left appear close they are more likely to be several metres away and so I need to steer towards them, even though it seems I am driving into them. Not only have I not made contact with anything, I find there is still space to spare.
equally, when cars appear to be well over on the right side, I must assume they are much closer and take avoiding action by keeping well away. Things must be improving for me because recently drivers of oncoming traffic have stopped pulling over to the side with horrified expressions on their faces.
I have tried to convince my instructor that there is a marked improvement between my spatial judgment now from when I was 18 — pseudoneglect is one of the few conditions that improves with age.
But I’m steeling myself to tell the other mothers that they may well have to wait for my 70th birthday before I’m ready — and able — to drive them around.