We Did It!

I sat in the passenger seat beside my Student Driving Son last night and it turns out that there is no thrilling story to tell at the end of our maiden voyage.

I'm not certain how long we he drove but at the end of it, he decided that 'now' was a good time to hand me back the keys and he said, "I think that we both did fairly well" (I didn't overpower him with my anxiety and he didn't crash).

He did tell me what he saw and felt from my body language in the passenger seat though.

"From my peripheral vision, it looked like you were sitting at an angle towards the driver's seat" and my hands. He noticed my hands.

He compared his three learning driving experiences and who/what made him feel the most calm.

His driving instructor holds onto the handhold above the passenger seat and has his foot poised over the brake pedal at all times. Not very reassuring to one who has been behind the wheel zero to two times before driving with a professional instructor.

His Older Brother sat calmly, facing the road with his hands nonchalantly at his side (or on his lap or anywhere that they may naturally have fallen).

I had my hands out in front of me. Some parents use their imaginary brake pedal and almost push through the floorboards in a subconscious effort to stop a moving vehicle like Fred Flintstone did in the cartoons. Not me. We were working on steering as he made right hand turns. Apparently I had an imaginary steering wheel.

I was completely unaware of the language my body was speaking but as My Son told me what he saw out of the corner of his eye, the 'language' he felt precisely replicated my anxieties.

Even when we are holding back and not saying what we shouldn't say, our bodies speak loud and clear. If we do not want our body language to betray us, we must firmly believe in that-which-we-say.

This must be why a person automatically trusts one person over another. Who they are on the outside, is the same person that resides within.

Now I must go and teach myself to believe in my Young Son's driving capabilities. I must erase the "We Crashed" headline from my mind before we head out again. We have only just begun...