supporting a daughter's fragile sense of self

Our saintly middle daughter tried to get her learner's permit today. She has waited this long because of her concern about her epilepsy issues (she has only ever had two seizures, the last one was a year ago last February). Her doctor cleared her to get a license if she wanted last fall, but she has really been struggling with confidence and worrying about the epilepsy.

We have been trying to get her to want to drive and hoping that she will be driving by fall, which would make my life so much easier. She could drive herself to class, and possibly even drive her sister since they are taking classes at the same campus. She has been studying the rules of the road book for over a month, but never seemed to be ready to step up and take the test. Part natural shyness, part fear I think.

Anyway, today was her first attempt at the permit test, and she missed one question more than is allowed. She was crushed. I told her that both her brother and sister had to take it more than once, and now that she has seen the questions that they ask she will have some idea of how to study for the next time she takes it tomorrow (I hope).

I wish there was more I could do for her, but realistically all I can do is take her to take the test as often as it takes. I did talk to her a bit about how to take a multiple choice test (eliminating the least likely answers first to cut down the possible choices on the ones you have to guess at).

I really hope she passes it the next time. I don't think she can take another failure.

Pax

Warning!

Playing with the buttons on your new Garmin can be really scary!


Case in point:

Tuesday the weather was really bad -- ice storm bad! I had driven up to see my spiritual director (about a 65 mile drive) and had intended to go from there with my sister to see our mom in the nursing home. But when I was done with direction the weather had begun to deteriorate, so I stayed at my sisters for a bit and then headed back home ( a trip that normally takes an hour and a half on a slow day).

about 25 miles into the drive (and an hour of driving due to conditions getting worse by the minute) I encountered stalled traffic on the highway, and a nice gentleman in a truck said that there were two accidents up ahead one of them being a semi blocking both lanes of traffic.

So, since I had my trusty new Garmin in my car, I just hit the nice little detour button figuring it would find me a nice safe way to get around the accident and into the nearby town (which was eight or so miles up the road.)

What the Garmin proceeded to do was take me on a merry chase through the countryside on small country roads and worse. Some were one lane gravel roads. I am sure to the GPS they looked quite passable, and if the weather hadn't been so bad they might not have been so scary. (Although one neighborhood was a banjo shy of Deliverance). At one point I could barely get up a hill it was so iced over and so far out into the country that salt trucks never get there I am sure. I even pulled into a driveway halfway up and called my husband to tell him I didn't think I could get up the hill. He said to just keep trying, which I did and eventually I got up the hill (lucky for me that was the last bad hill before I got back onto a major state road.

When I got to the State Road, I got turned around and the traffic going into the town I intended to go to was totally stopped still, so I went the other direction hoping the Garmin would "recalculate" but no such luck. Beyotce just wanted me to turn around and go back the other way. I kept driving south and ended up in a town about 15 miles south of where I needed to be. That was when I stopped for Gas and asked the nice lady working at the Gas station what I should do.


Come to find out, a major hill on the state road was totally impassable (hence the stopped traffic going in the direction I would have had to go.) She said I could go south another three miles and then turn east for three miles and I would be at a road that would take me to a town that was one county south/west of where I lived. I figured I could get home from there.

Only when I finally got to there I decided that rather than take the shorter but much more curvy route I would take the much longer but straighter route , which added about an hour or so to the drive again. Then I drove right by where mrangelmeg works and where it normally takes him 25 minutes to get home, it took me nearly a hour and a half to travel the same distance. I did find out a salt truck had turned over off the side of the road (actually mrangelmeg saw it and told me about it, ).


Traffic was bumper to bumper in both directions for most of the last part of the drive and I was terrified that I wasn't going to be able to make the left-hand turn into my driveway, so for the last two miles I was praying to every saint I could think of to give me help, and there was just enough of a break in traffic for me to make the turn without having to hold up the traffic coming up the hill behind me (praise God).

The lesson I learned from this was, when weather conditions are dicey, don't mess with the detour button on your GPS system. I probably would have been smarter to head back to my sister's house and wait out the storm and drive back down on Wednesday morning when the ice had all been washed away by constant rain.

I did learn that I can handle a car pretty well in adverse conditions too, which is nice to know.
I just hope I never have to do that again, ever!

Pax

So Much For an Abundance of Grace

I went to Mass this morning, as is my typical Friday routine. It was a really nice Mass. I have begun a new practice of jotting down a few lines from the readings and/or homily (getting my one thing, you might say) in a nice little notebook that fits in my purse. Somehow since I started doing this I feel as though I have a better connection to the Liturgy and in an odd way to God's plan for me.

So I did that today; took down a few words about the readings and Father's wandering remarks to the kids (it was a school mass) along the lines of our obligation is to tell the Good News, and to prepare ourselves to do so by whatever means present themselves to us so that we will be ready to do whatever work God calls us to do (rather than whatever work we ourselves choose).

By the time I left church it was pouring down rain and I had to drive through campus. We live in a really nice town which happens to be the home of a major Midwestern Big Ten University School. Most of the year I love living here, but I really don't enjoy the campus at all. I felt really uplifted by the Liturgy, but the short two mile drive through the heart of campus to get to my side of town took all my joy.

In that two miles I encountered a woman who crossed the street directly in front of my car which had been stopped for a red light but was now free to go, except that she decided that she should continue to cross in front of me. I can't be sure, but there are probably glaciers that move more rapidly than this particular woman was advancing across the street, not at the crosswalk, mind you which was only maybe fifteen feet in front of where she had chosen to cross. So I had to wait for her.

Then a young man in a very large pickup truck who apparently had never been instructed in the proper use of the turn signal decided to change lanes and maneuver the huge truck (I am not sure why he thought he would need a half-ton truck on a college campus anyway) into the very small space that had opened up in front of my car. I am so lucky that I saw him in time because I had time to put on my brake and let him in.

I got stopped at a light about halfway through campus and watched another young scholar on a bike sit through the entire green light without moving a muscle, only to dart across the intersection (again right in front of me) just after his light turned red and mine turned green. What could he possibly have been thinking? Perhaps he was having a dyslexic day.

And if that wasn't enough, a group of young women decided that rather than walk on the perfectly clear sidewalk, they would walk down the gutter, two abreast, laughing and paying no attention at all to the traffic that had to follow them. This is their campus I suppose.

I was never so happy to see the curve in the road that signifies the end of campus and the start of downtown. The rest of the drivers in my town are shallow, ignorant and obnoxious, but they don't think the universe revolves around them like the students on the Campus do.

By the time I got home I was exhausted.

Maybe there is another way to get from church to my house without going too many miles out of the way that would avoid campus all together? I'll have to think about that for a while.

Pax

Vatican Promulgates Driver's 10 Commandments

We all have seen how horrible the road rage has gotten in the last few years. Some of us may even have been victims of it. Some of us may even have been perpetrators of it. (I am the worst at shouting at drivers who are doing something stupid, just ask my kids).

The Vatican has stepped in to help us all in our "road to holiness" and has given us this wonderful document The Pastoral Care of Road Users. to aide us in our use of the highways and byways as Catholic Christians who hopefully eventually want to get to heaven. Included in this document which is well worth reading the entire document, is the Ten Commandments for Drivers:

I. You shall not kill.

II. The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm.

III. Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.

IV. Be charitable and help your neighbour in need, especially victims of accidents.

V. Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.

VI. Charitably convince the young and not so young not to drive when they are not in a fitting condition to do so.

VII. Support the families of accident victims.

VIII. Bring guilty motorists and their victims together, at the appropriate time, so that they can undergo the liberating experience of forgiveness.

IX. On the road, protect the more vulnerable party.

X. Feel responsible towards others.

I may have to print those out and post them in my car, I used to get really upset at mrangelmeg when he stopped to help stranded motorists. Now I will have to think twice about how I feel about that. I will also have to be a little more forgiving of those people who do stupid things that make me mad in the car. My immortal soul may depend on it now.

h/t to Fr Roderic of Daily Breakfast/SQPN for the heads up on the ten commandments of you don't get the Daily Breakfast podcast you really should, they are awesome. At least go to SQPN and check out the other Catholic content you can get, I get three or four of them and they are all great.

Pax