Reasons I Love My Mother

Reason #361:

Big car trips were fun with my mom. We would always plan to leave at six, be really close to leaving by seven, and then finally leave at around eleven thirty, give or take.

And that’s just when we would pull out of the driveway. We would then have to go to Starbucks for coffee, and then after that, Del Taco for some breakfast burritos. By the time we were actually on the freeway by well after noon, our car already looked like we had been living in it for weeks.

My mom was the same way about shopping trips. Shopping would eventually get done, but not before getting some sort of coffee or pretzel. There was just an order to things, and skipping right to the shopping would have made no sense to anyone involved.

On long car trips when I was in middle and high school, my dad would make us say the Rosary out loud together. Yep, the Rosary. For those that don’t know, that’s where you count on beads and say The Hail Mary and The Lord’s Prayer until you’ve talked for so long that you’ve lost your voice. We would even all hold hands — my dad would have one hand on the wheel, and be holding my mom’s hand with the other. Then the chain of hand-holding would continue throughout the car. I hated doing this when I was little, and writing about it now, I feel like this story should end with some lesson about how I came to learn that I was in a cult. But I wasn’t. I was just on an eight-hour drive to Newport Beach.

But sarcasm aside, I really liked that my mom and dad held hands sometimes while they drove. Even when they weren’t doing some 45-minute long prayer. Sometimes, one of them would just reach over and they’d hold hands while my dad drove.

It was nice.