Women Driving
Happy International Women's Day!
Dedicated to my mother-in-law, who has gently encouraged me to get my license for the past two decades
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means as a woman who never learned to drive and how women generations older than me might feel about this semi-conscious choice. Do I seem too traditional or even anti-feminist to them? That I rely on the man too much for taking the family places, that I’m the helpless damsel who’s the default secondary parent because I can’t drive?
Since starting this self-reflection, I looked up statistics on driving rates in North America between men and women, curious about whether there was a gender gap with driving, but to my surprise, there isn’t. In fact, 2024 stats show that women make up slightly more of the percentage of licensed drivers in in the United States at 50.7% and are roughly equal in Canada. I didn’t have a lot of close adult females drivers growing up so it never resonated with me that of course men and women were equal drivers.
The women in my family: an ode to us non-drivers
I’ll start with my Granny, my dad’s mom, who I loved dearly and only found out recently could actually drive. My Granny was a saint. A devout Irish Catholic, born and raised in Renfrew, Ontario, and had the nicest lilt when she spoke. A true Ottawa Valley Gal. I can still hear her voice 20 years after her passing, the way she pronounced berries “burries” and the famous “g’day” that’s enshrined up and down the Valley.
My Granny gave birth to 14 children. Her first, a daughter named Mary, died in infancy at one month old. My dad (third born, but second oldest) recently told me about a fender bender my Granny was involved in while driving six of her baker’s dozen children in the car some time in the 1960s. That incident was enough to make her abruptly hang up the keys for good. I’d be scarred for life too if I were my Granny.
My Granny lived her entire life in Renfrew, and wasn’t shy about asking for rides from kind men and women she knew after my grandfather passed. She was by all accounts an independent woman, a true Sagittarius with an adventurous spirit, who travelled, drank gin and tonics, and more than once tried to take my brother and me off to her priest to baptize us while looking after us during summer breaks.
While writing this, I had a memory of my Granny saying a rhyming couplet to me with the smile of a little girl: “Sunday, Monday, Hyundai” but with her Ottawa Valley accent it was more like “Sundee, Mundee, Hundee.” She was a car girl!
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Family trauma time
My mom’s family was a different story. She grew up in a what many would be considered a broken home. My grandparents were involved in a head-on collision on Labour Day, 1960. My grandmother died at the scene at the age of 28. My mom had just turned eight that July.
My mom and her two younger brothers were orphaned in an instant. It’s the MADD commercial you see on T.V., a tragedy that’s so common and cruel. To her, that’s her baby brother, who was only 18 months old. I can’t even post a still of the video because it’s so awful and depressing.
After the crash, my grandfather remained in the hospital for weeks recovering. My mom’s paternal grandmother, who was there the night of the accident, and both her maternal and paternal aunts took over childcare duties. A funeral happened without the kids or my grandfather. There was no closure, no way to grieve with extended family and community—just pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and getting on. Except, that’s not what happened, and the family suffered more than I’ll ever know.
Because she was so young, my mom barely knew hers at all and referred to her only as “my mother.” I could be making this up but I think she did this as a way for her to protect the precious memory of her mom who was ripped from her so cruelly. When looking at family photos, and I’m so grateful there are numerous, my mom’s mom was a strikingly beautiful, vibrant, talented women who overcame her own family struggles of extreme poverty and maternal loss when she was a young teen, only for her life to end in tragedy. I don’t know if she ever drove, but my guess is that she did, just not that night.
Today is my grandmother’s birthday, which I’ve never realized until today when thinking about writing this piece of my family’s history. It’s as if by some strange maternal connection, that I saw it for the first time on International Women’s Day.
Happy Birthday, Granny Eileen.
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As a teen, my mom failed her driving test and eventually became licensed after I was born when she was in her late 20s. I have a few vivid memories of being in the car with my mom while she was driving. She was a petite woman, and it seemed that her stature made her all the more nervous, leaning over the steering wheel to see.
But her nervousness became physical. Her left hand would go numb behind the wheel, a fuzziness that started to happen more frequently while not driving. It was enough of a worry that she didn’t trust herself anymore and became a non-driver nearly overnight just like my dad’s mom.
Many years later, my mom was diagnosed with epilepsy after having a grand mal seizure at work. It was like she knew that indecipherable feeling in her left hand was a ticking time bomb with the potential to cause great harm. She’d continue to renew her license though, because she preferred it for I.D., never having been flagged by the Ministry of Transportation.
When my parents were empty-nesters, my mom became sentimental about her dad and the life he had when he was young. My grandpa loved old country music and went to tree school in Tennessee in the 1940s to learn the trade with dreams of becoming a lumber baron in Eastern Ontario.
One of the things my mom and dad could never agree on was taking road trips to the States. My dad has been a staunch anti-American since before I can remember, and the last thing he wanted to do was drive to Nashville and check out the scene, even if it meant the world to my mom.
If I had been able to drive, this is the exact thing I would have done with her. My mom died January 24, 2021 from complications due to Grade 4 brain cancer, the source of her epilepsy all those years ago.
I love and miss her, but am so glad I was able to have her well into my adulthood, that she met all four of her grandchildren and that she got her driver’s license after three attempts.
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Hug the women in your life today. We’re amazing.