On being a one car family

We are a family of four with one car. Before I go further, I want to be clear: this is not a thing. This is not a slow cooking movement. This is not the capsule wardrobe gimmick. You will likely not find a One Car Family Ideas board on Pinterest.

This is also not a ponzi scheme or some other elitist scam for the 1%. This is written with full awareness that to own even ONE car is a privilege not enjoyed by a great majority of the world's population, nevermind an ability to fuel one's car on a regular basis plus the Nationwide Auto Transportation fees, etc.

This is, however, something of a lifestyle choice in an overprivileged overconsumptive sovereign nation and one I would choose over and over again. Do you like how I just cleared my throat for three straight paragraphs?

I've been asked by several people about being a one-car family, which appears to be something of a distinction in the carpool lanes in which I idle. I've thought quite a bit about this and what this says about me: that people would assume this would pose difficulty for us. Fair enough, I say. Because both adults in our family work outside the home in a geography where public transportation is not accessible/reliable for our purposes. Because we send our kids to a school that is not serviced by big yellow schoolbuses. Because we live in an age where 3-car garages are becoming standard in newly constructed homes.

So, I'll claim it as a thing--our thing. We are a one-car family. We have only ever been a one-car family. I brought no car to the relationship. My hubby inherited a green Honda CRV from his parents when we married, but she has since died (RIP Green Bus) and now we drive what I am told is the official car of the New England lesbian: a Subaru Outback. And we love her.

I'll also fully disclose that my hubby and I also own a mo-ped which he is crazy kind enough to drive much of the year to work and back.

There are many obvious perks to being a one-car fam. We pay less in auto insurance than if we owned, operated more vehicles. We only ever have to gas up one vehicle (the mo-ped uses less than $3/week in gas). When we lived in the city, I took the train everywhere, even when I had a double stroller for which I apologize to all who had to make room for me and my Hummer on the T. Now that we don't live near public trans, we work hard to economize our trips instead of just going out whenever we feel like it.

There are some less obvious perks, though, and these are the ones I value most. After speaking with another family who enjoys being a one-car fam, we agreed that there is a heightened communication system that is necessary with owning one car. Simply put: you have to share more. You have to share where you're going, what time you'll be home. I'm sure folks with multiple vehicles do this, but, in the case when my hubby drives the mo-ped to work, I have to stay mindful of the weather patterns. If it sleets, rains, or heaven forbid snows, I know we'll be packing up the kids in their jammies and schlepping downtown in the car to pick up Daddy. I love this about being a one-car family. We spend a lot of time catching up in the car. We work together as a family to keep it clean, inside and out.

Because of Loverpants' and my disparate schedules, we don't often share meals. Instead, we share the wide open road, sharing pieces of our day as we both gaze in the same direction, with our little backseat drivers chiming in and driving us absolutely nuts. And I would not have it any other way.

On siblings, neck strangles, and advantages

"That was nice, Baby Girl," I said after I saw her putting her brother into an affectionate neck strangle. "I gave [Little Man] a hug and told him he did a good job," she said.

It wasn't that she knew he did a good job; she spent the entirety of the T-ball game sifting through the nearby stream for minnows.

It wasn't that this was our routine after games: hugs and attaboys.

I think it was that she knew he needed it. Siblings can sense these unspoken needs in a way that is hard to qualify or quantify but which seems as true and clear as a car emerging from the car wash. Perhaps that is what siblings are: people who have come through the same wash cycle, people who've been scrubbed by the same soap, buffed by the same brushes, people who entered and exited from the same places. And sometimes they're not even biological.

My friend Haddy says she loves "to see siblings becoming." I think this is perfectly put. After just a week at home with my kids on summer vacation, I love to see them becoming so much more than the girl and boy who were knit together in the same pouch. Their identities as singular punks are evolving just as surely as the identity they share as a sibling set: they are whole people and they are part of a whole greater than themselves. They share a horizontal relationship that will be recognized with confirmations, like, "Ah, of course, you are his sister," and, at times, with incredulity "Oh! He's your brother?!"  that I'm sure will follow them well into their adulthood.

I am grateful to have witnessed their early moments of gelling and the inevitable moments where they beat the tar out of one another. I am overcome sometimes how two people who didn't get to choose one another for five years continue to choose one another: as playmates, as best frenemies.  I think about the disadvantages they have, living so many hundreds of miles removed from any family. How they don't know many of their grands and aunties and uncles and cousins in anything more than monochrome, in one dimension.

But then I think about the great, immeasurable advantage of just having a sibling with whom to suffer these really weird parents. Even if they have nothing in common, have disparate life goals, have no abiding interest in pursuing a meaningful relationship with one another--siblings have the goods on one another. They understand how each other came to be, far better than their parents could ever fathom. They will know the ticking of each other's hearts, not just the steady rhythmic beats but the wild, erratic hiccups and dips and the soul-thirst for a hug after a T-ball game, where upon a little brother, aka "Little Bother" asked the snack provider for an extra juicebox. "For my sister."

The most amazing folk concert ever

The last time my sister visited me in my single gal Boston apartment was Columbus Day weekend 2004. I took her out to dinner with my friend Melissa at this extra crunchy vegetarian cafe that also doubled as a folk concert venue. I truly thought that I was showing TP the best of Boston's cultural outlets. Squash and goat cheese pizza with a live singer-songwriter chaser. What could go wrong? I gave the performance schedule a cursory glance and noticed that the live act would be a folk family, which is always a risk. The Partridge Family taught us that. So did the Brady Bunch when they gave us Sunshine Day. Everybody's smiling? Inaccurate. But I figured TP would be impressed since she was still in undergrad where live music usually means the emo girl down the hall playing the same Joni Mitchell song over and over on her acoustic guitar, whenever/especially when she's going through a break-up.

Dinner was so good; I remember feeling all mirthy and shiny that two of the best ladies in the land were breaking bread with me and that no animals were killed in the process. We were all three sort of giggly mock-planning my wedding in which both TP and Melissa would be star bridesmaids and it was probably the last time I wasn't stressed about planning my wedding. The fact that Loverpants and I weren't engaged yet may or may not have been super material.

The act began and there was just no question that this was a mistake. There wasn't even an intro song that was rocky that made us think, Oh, well, they're just getting warmed up. It was bad. They weren't necessarily bad musicians. It was that they were embarrassing performers: embarrassing themselves while making every audience member feel entirely ashamed for having stayed.  The mom had this incredible mane of hair, and for every song, the hair was its own instrument.  She was strumming on the guitar but she would hinge at the waist so that her hair swung like this really thick, wavy pendulum. It was hypnotic but also embarrassing. There were lots of stories, too. Ayiyiyiyi. Stories. Anecdotal introductions and interludes and postludes.

Meanwhile, the windows of the basement cafe revealed the foot traffic above in Harvard Square. Taryn, Melissa and I kept looking up at the feet headed to exciting places--wonders untold like dorm rooms and Chinese buffets--and we exchanged raised eyebrows and shifted in our chairs, trying to thwart the magical folk hair force field.

Just as we thought we had reached the official intermission of the program and were about to make a run for it, the folk family brought up their daughter, Anna*. She had been sitting as a patron in the cafe. She was a student at Harvard. Oh, cool. How neat that their daughter was able to attend her parents' performance ANNA GET YOUR DEGREE, HONEY. THEN RUN FAR AWAY. But as they ushered Anna onto stage, it was clear that she needed assistance. She was blind.

Oh. NO. We can't leave now. Who leaves a folk family about to introduce their blind daughter who goes to an Ivy League school and will probably win multiple Nobel Prizes before she even graduates?

Then her mother told us the significance of the next song. It was inspired by how Anna had once developed a brain tumor which rendered her blind. We are the worst humans ever. She had written a letter to Garth Brooks who was so inspired by her fandom and her courage. Seriously, the worst. He sent a limo to escort Anna to his concert and made sure that she had the best seats in the house as she was still going through treatments to shrink the tumors. Us? Nope. Nobody leaving here. Everybody psyched to sit here and listen to "Anna's Angel."

TP and I still sing "Anna's Angel" in spite of our unimpressive manes which could never hypnotize anyone. It is our penance for trying to pull ditch on A Mighty Wind: Cambridge-style, 2004.

*Names changed to protect the innocent.