Whenever September rolls around, I typically do a couple of things. First, I let out a booming "Hallelujah!" because my kiddos are (finally) back in school and no longer eating their way through every cupboard, cabinet and accessible crevice in our kitchen. Then, after performing a highly rousing happy dance, I get a little misty-eyed.
When life involves kids, time truly does fly. It seems like only yesterday that I was packing their diaper bags and schlepping them over to Barnes & Noble, where they'd sit rapt in the kids" section while I sipped a Frappuccino and looked longingly at all the books I didn't have time to read.
But much to my disbelief, this year, I got a bit (well, maybe more than a bit) nostalgic about a piece of machinery that, up until recently, was a major part of my kid-hauling life.
My minivan.
OK, I hear the collective moan now. And trust me, I thought the same thing before I bought it: There is absolutely no way I will ever drive a minivan!
Yeah, that's what they all say.
I opted for the van out of pure necessity (read: desperation). It was June; I had 2-year-old twins and a baby due the next month. My means of transport at the time? A very satisfactory but very undersized sedan. Let me assure you that trying to shoehorn three carseats into a Nissan Altima is a logistical feat that defies possibility. (And trust me - I tried.)
Back in the early aughts, when you needed an auto roomy enough to corral that many carseats, your options were much more limited than they are now. Yes, you're right: I could have bought a Suburban. But - and this is in no way an affront to Chevy lovers - it seems like a complete waste of money to procure an automobile and then have it sit untouched. (Translation: There's no way on earth I could have maneuvered that gargantuan thing out of my garage, much less piloted it in and around town.) So, grudgingly, I became a minivan mama.
And you know what? Over the next 11 years, I grew to love that minivan. Loyal to the core and always up for adventure, my silver seven-seater never let me down. OK, so it once left me in the lurch in a Target parking lot, but that was the dead battery's fault, not my van's. And, yes, the "power door" stopped being powerful around year nine, as did my dashboard lights, trunk latch, passenger-side window and driver-side mirror (this, dear readers, is where duct tape comes in mighty handily). But besides these minor snafus, my trusty Toyota and I shared some really good times.
So when, after spending more than a decade of my life as a minivan driver, I decided to swap it for a smaller vehicle, letting go of my van was harder than I thought. Even now, there are days when, while traversing the near-perpetual traffic of our fair city, I gaze out amid the congestion and glimpse its spitting image. Could it be my former six-cylinder friend tooling around town with its new owner? I look in vain for the telltale signs, like the scratch mistakenly brought on by son's bike handlebars or the dent from the gigantic bird that literally fell from the sky while I was driving on I-20 and landed smack-dab on my hood. (True story.) And I find myself wistfully reminiscing about our years together.
After a few moments of quiet repose, I put the pedal to the non-minivan metal and zip away - thankful that I have such fond memories … and a mirror without tape.
