Are We There Yet?

I glance back at him in my rear-view mirror. He’s looking out his window, his hands clapped together at his mouth. I wonder what he’s thinking about. He hasn’t spoken for several minutes, probably the result of not falling asleep during his nap time. He’s tired and subdued, but still resistant to sleep.

Our car rides over the last two weeks have been funny at times. After three years of riding rear-facing, I just turned his car seat so he’s facing forward like the rest of us. The world looks a little different to him now. He’s been confused by different turns, not recognizing it from his new position. But today, he’s quiet. Thinking. Observing.

I change lanes to take a ramp from one highway to another. “What time is it?” he asks as we circle the ramp.

“6:52, buddy.” I always think it’s funny when he asks this. He doesn’t know anything about time. He is three, after all. Time is either right now or too long when you’re three. But he asks the question often, probably because he hears it from his older siblings, who do in fact understand time.

“Are we there yet?” He says it without a whine. It’s just another question he’s somehow learned to ask, again, probably from his eleven-year-old sister, who sometimes likes to believe she will wilt away during long drives in the car.

“No, buddy, you know we’re not there. Do you see our road yet?”

“Oh.”

He puts his hands back to his mouth and looks out the window as trees and cars whizz by us.

My family didn’t take particularly long road trips when I was growing up. If I’m not mistaken, the longest trips I went on were four hours from home.

I remember, on many such trips, counting trees. I’m not sure what the highest number I ever counted was, but since the Virginia and North Carolina highways where we mostly traveled are lined with trees, I imagine it was a lot.

I also counted tractor-trailers. Sometimes my counting would morph to a game where my siblings and I tried to get a tractor-trailer driver to honk at us. Oh, how we laughed and laughed when we succeeded, and then before we stopped laughing, we’d start trying all over again.

Of course, I also enjoyed the alphabet game, the quintessential road-trip activity in which you have to find the letters in alphabetical order on signs or license plates. My siblings and I would shout out letters as we saw them, claiming dibs so no one else could use it. It was always frustrating to get stuck on one of the less frequently used letters at the end of the alphabet. I don’t find it amusing when businesses use unconventional spelling for their names, but who doesn’t love a good Qwik Stop gas station when playing the alphabet game? Twenty to thirty years later, and my kids are playing the same games in the car.

Today, they start by playing the alphabet game during the ten-hour trip (though it will take us twelve) from our home in North Carolina to southern Florida, where we’ll spend the week at a friend’s river house about ten minutes from the Atlantic Ocean.

We shift quickly from the alphabet game to trivia. Everyone plays, except the three-year-old who shouts out answers because he thinks he’s playing.

We take a break after a while when we change drivers. My oldest two children are both adults now and happily take turns driving, especially when it means the opportunity to uncurl their bodies from the cramped spaces in the back seat of our minivan.

Three hours in, the three-year-old asks, “Are we there yet?”

“No, buddy, not even close,” his eleven-year-old sister says. “We’ve only gone—“ she checks the clock, “three hours! We’ve only gone three hours?” She sighs and moans softly. I watch from my sun visor mirror as she wiggles around in her seat, mumbling, “Only three hours!” several times.

The eighteen-year-old reminds her wiggling youngest sister that, besides the toddler, she’s the smallest person in the van and does not get to take up the most room. Bickering starts. I tell them to stop and to think of serving each other. It will be a long ride, after all. They don’t stop, despite my compelling speech, but quiet their volume instead.

“Are we there yet?” the three-year-old asks again, this time to no one.

Last year, we made the same trip: Ten hours, which took us twelve, to southern Florida to stay in a river house ten minutes from the Atlantic Ocean.

Last year, we made the same trip for the same reason: we left the day after we graduated one of our children from high school. Our whole family felt the big change of sending him off to college looming over us. A week away was what we needed. Memories to keep forever. Time together with our oldest still with us, for another week, just as it had been for nineteen years.

This year, we made the ten-hour trek again (in twelve hours), the day after we graduated our second-oldest from high school. Two months from now, we’ll wave goodbye to our two oldest when we leave both of them together at their college campus. We are dreading the changes in the horizon again, but this time with a little more understanding of how hard it will be and that we will actually survive the changes.

We need this week at the beach. More memories, the seven of us. More time together with both our twenty- and eighteen-year-olds still with us.

Our fifteen-year-old tells us that she fully expects to be leaving on a ten-hour drive to the beach that will take us twelve hours the day after she graduates from high school. She knows that high school graduation is quite an accomplishment—we’ve told both of her older siblings so—and she lets us know that she, too, will deserve a week at the beach after making it to that milestone.

The toddler shouts out, “Me too!” though I’m not sure he even knows what we were talking about. He begins to hum before asking, again, “Are we there yet?”

In thinking about my daughter’s graduation, I’ve realized that I’ve spoken about it with her as both the subject and the direct object, though not at the same time. She is graduating from high school. She is the doer, the actor, the subject. But, at the same time, my husband and I are graduating her from our home school. She is the recipient of the action. Something is happening to her by someone else (in this case, by her parents).

Not all parents have the honor of being the subject of their children’s high school graduation. For the student of a traditional high school, the school, its administration, and faculty (compound subject) are graduating their students (direct object). A traditional school has a list of requirements, deemed necessary by the school’s governing body, to graduate. Generally, they will require twenty-two or so credits of core classes and electives. Sometimes, you’ll find another requirement or two: a senior thesis or capstone, especially at a classical school, or a minimum number of volunteer hours. But someone besides the parents determined which classes and extracurricular activities are necessary for a student to earn his high school diploma.

My kids don’t go to a traditional school, however. There is no one telling me what they must finish, learn, do, or achieve before we complete a high school education. The state of North Carolina has recommendations, but in the end, my husband and I are responsible for what must be completed. And so, graduating my children, I looked at them and wondered, “Are we there yet? Is this what a high school graduate is supposed to be able to do? Is this how they’re supposed to be able to think? Is what we did right? Is what we did enough?”

It’s a terrifying thing to graduate your children from high school, hoping they’ll be able to meet adulthood and be successful. If they aren’t prepared, I can’t blame the schools or the teachers for their failures.

Home schooling reveals all of my weaknesses and shortcomings. My temper flares when there are tears over math. My lack of mastery is revealed when I try to explain biology or chemistry. Even literature and grammar, content I was once paid to teach to other people’s children, can stump me. My own failures are revealed daily as I try to move my children on step closer day by day to being a well-educated, well-rounded adult. Why am I not there yet? How can I get them there if I’m nowhere close?

Once or maybe twice a year, a young woman will approach me and ask if we can get together. She’ll tell me she respects me or looks up to me and wants to spend time with me. I sometimes look around to see if there is someone else close by she’s actually speaking to.

Me? No, you must mean someone else. I’m not there yet. I’m short-tempered and uncharitable. I have too much to learn.

Last month, a young lady was, indeed, speaking to me. She wanted to study the Bible with me.

We started by reading some of the Proverbs while also reading the story of Solomon’s life found in 1 Kings. How was the wisest man alive such a foolish man? How did he manage to pass on so many truthful proverbs to us and yet make such a mess of his life? If he can’t make it, what hope is there for me? And how in the world am I supposed to help my kids? Are we there yet? Shouldn’t I be more confident in myself, more sure about what I’m doing?

But maybe that’s the right place to be—feeling some tension with your independence, your adulthood, your accomplishment; remembering there is much to learn still and more ways to grow and plenty of weaknesses to shore up. Maybe that’s where I need to guide my children: to a place where they are mature enough to ask for help, to seek knowledge and wisdom, to confess and repent.

It was 12:30 am when we finally pulled into our driveway, a full twelve hours since we had left southern Florida for our home. We spent the week playing in the ocean and the pool, building in the sand, kayaking, and reading. We ate good meals, took long naps, and went on long runs (everyone but the toddler and me) and long walks (those of us who can’t run). It was the kind of vacation you hope for.

Oh, but the drive home was even tougher than the drive there. We had traffic and a terrible storm that, at times, made it impossible to see the road.

My daughter drove the last leg so I could be closer to her baby brother who was screaming. He had woken up after a few hours of sleep upset that we were not, in fact, there yet. When she parked the van in our driveway, she turned it off and stretched before gathering trash around the front seat. The eleven-year-old pushed her way out of the van and stumbled through the front door, up the stairs, and to her bed. The fifteen-year-old grabbed as many bags as she could carry from the back row and disappeared inside, not to be seen again until a few hours after the sun had risen. My husband and our oldest son began the hard task of emptying the trunk and the rooftop-carrier of all the bags.

I made the toddler very angry when I got him out of his seat, where he had just gotten content for the last fifteen minutes of the drive. I stepped inside our house and breathed in the sweet smell of us. My toddler was angrier with every step we took. We made it to his room, where I changed him quickly as he screamed and then I put him in his bed. He instantly quieted, rolled to his stomach, and mumbled, “Are we there yet?”

Image Credit: Degas, “Ballet Dancers” (1888)