There are milestones bigger than your first car, but it’s definitely up there. It’s a security question for almost every password-protected website for a reason: It’s hard to forget, seared in your brain, for better or for worse, and almost always synonymous with freedom and independence. 

The first car I drove regularly was my mom’s red Volkswagen Cabriolet, purchased used in 1993, probably a 1987 or 1988 model, still chugging along (kind of) by the time I got behind the wheel in 1997. It was an absolute money pit, but that wasn’t my concern at age 17, and it was awfully fun to drive with the top down on sunny days with my friends. I did, allegedly, burn out the brakes by forgetting to take off the emergency brake. (I made my boyfriend, who drove a stick shift, park it for me in the Burger King parking lot because I didn’t know how to park in a 90-degree space, and he set the brake out of habit. I wasn’t well-versed enough in driving to know to take it off.) I also ran over the curb in front of our house on Toulouse Street and popped both passenger-side tires and, two years later, was driving that car when I caused my first (and only!) at-fault accident by driving directly through a red light because I was trying to see why the speedometer wasn’t working and forgot to … you know … look at the road (no one was hurt, thank God, but the car was somewhat the worse for wear). 

Following these incidents, my mother finally decided I was not going to drive her car anymore, and so I took all of my summer earnings from Baskin Robbins and sunk them into a 1989 Corolla, which was also a money pit but much less fun to drive. The timing belt went out within two months of owning it, followed not long after by the transmission, and then sometime in May, I spilled an entire chocolate malt (my end-of-shift free drink from Baskin Robbins) all over the passenger seat and floor mats, so it smelled like death and sour milk, and then in June, my then-boyfriend-now-ex-husband totalled it on Interstate 70. 

Following that, I was pretty much out of money from car repairs, but I managed to scrape together some money from my tax refund and selling back some textbooks, and I bought a 1988 Chevy Nova for $1,500. Joke all you want – I heard ‘em all. The Nova is the butt of a lot of jokes. But I loved that car, and I drove it until the wheels almost literally fell off. I bought it in the summer of 2000 and it got me through the rest of college, two years of grad school, and the first couple of years of my first real job. I sold it in the fall of 2006 when I was hugely pregnant and had to accept the reality that my quirky college car would not be the best choice to transport an infant. I sold it to another broke college kid and I think I cried as he drove away. (Although to be fair, I was hugely pregnant and cried at almost everything.)

Now that baby from the fall of 2006 is not only driving but getting her first real car this week, a mid-2010s Subaru, and I’m obviously terrified. I’m dreading the popped tires and the fender benders. I’m praying almost ceaselessly (and I’m not even particularly religious) every time she leaves the house.

But I’m also so excited for her adventures, her stories, her freedom and her independence. 

I won’t be a part of many of these adventures or stories, but I shouldn’t be. I’m not supposed to be. 

She is writing her own story now.