Embarrassing Principles

One of the losses of the year 2011 was that of our second car. A very cute, very versatile and agile Honda Fit. We had been a two-car family since 2000 and had gotten quite used to the ease of two cars. Of course, we also had to get used to the cost associated with two cars. But it always seemed doable and relatively unproblematic. Secretly, though, I continued to dream about only having one car and, possibly, none at all. Would life even be manageable with only one car, in a five-member family? How would we get all of us to school, to work, etc.? How would we run errands on the weekends? How would we deal with evenings where both adults had different things to do that required a car to get there?

Growing up I had, for the most part, assumed I would never own a car (or need to own one). Except for a few months after I first got my license (at 18, when I thought I wanted a car and had my grandfather who sold car-insurance calculate for me how much I would pay AFTER the purchase of the vehicle). I was able to rely on public transportation and my bicycle for most of the things I needed to do. I did have permission to use my mother's VW beetle. But at the .50 DM she charged me per kilometer, driving really was no fun and I would really only do it, if I had no other way of getting where I needed to be. Being without a car of my own had not just become a fact of life, it had become a principle of my life.

While living in the US had changed my life such that I did own a car and, later, even two, my principal attitude towards them never changed. Yes, I have to confess, losing the FIT seemed like a blessing. When it became clear that it was totalled and would not return to our garage, I was determined to hold on to this new situation and make having only one car work. But I am not the only member of this family and the other members--especially my wife and my two older sons--had their own misgivings about this new situation. For my wife the logistical issues often are aggravating, for my oldest son the second vehicle is a convenience issue and for my middle son the second car is a status symbol. I, for one, find that the logistical and convenience issues are easy to deal with. Really, it only takes a bit of planning and some decent communication (both of which our family was in need of anyway) and logistics and convenience are taken care of. With the additional help of bicycles and our local ZipCars we were in good shape.

Status is the more intractable issue and I am not yet sure what to do about it.

As it turns out my middle-son feels the loss of our FIT mostly as a loss of status and economic power. All his friends' parents have several vehicles and most of those vehicles are expensive, luxury or sports-cars. Every once in a while, when he and I spend some time together he will ask me about getting another car. He is a strong cyclist and takes pride in biking to school (something which he started last year when we still had two cars). It's different though, I can tell, when biking to school becomes a necessity because there is no other car. And even though, I pull his younger brother behind me in a trailer to the same school every morning, Jacob always elects to ride there by himself. I know it is embarrassing to him to pull into the school yard, with his dad and little brother on a bike and trailer next to him.

But the embarrassment doesn't stop there. Recently, I had to drive Jacob to a basket-ball game and since my wife still had the car I got us a ZipCar. As we were nearing the town where the game was taking place, Jacob started asking me questions about where on the outside of the car the ZipCar logo can be found. He did not want his friends to see that he was brought in a ZipCar. Since the logo is on only one side, the passenger side, I offered to drop him off in such a way that the passenger side would not face the gym and all the other people who were waiting there. But Jacob asked me drop him off a couple of blocks before we even got to the gym.

Before we got there we talked a little bit about the advantages of a ZipCar. I encouraged him to take pride in doing something that was so environmentally sound, so democratic and so cost-effective. He listened to all those arguments, but he was clear on this matter: he was not be seen in this car with his father driving it.

I am not quite sure yet what to make of this. I do know that I want to respect his embarrassment as I think of it not as a rebellion against me or us but rather as a way for Jacob to form and arrive at his own values. I do feel a certain amount of pain, however, that he won't just agree with me. It's so obvious that this one-car situation is good, right? My own delight about this new-found freedom--freedom from a second car--is not reflected in what Jacob feels about the situation. I wish it were. Really. It is hard not to be in the cultural main-stream. With only one car we definitely are not in that stream (or, one might say, we are, but we're swimming against it). And, for Jacob, having a German father, simply put, reduces the odds of us ever swimming down-stream. Ever.

Some of the benefits of being in a family with a Euro-American mix are less supervision and more trust, treatment of teens not as "kids" but as young adults, Nutella, valuing our children's opinions, etc.

Some of the disadvantages are a reduced likelihood of particpating in American consumerism, often radical political opinions, speedos for men, as well as some strange food-choices such as blood-sausage and liver as well as many different types of cabbage.

However, what I really would like to remember from this, and from other situations in which my sons' embarrassment about us is an issue, is that not only parents get embarrassed when their children don't behave. Children get embarrassed about us as well. It pays to notice these, to make them useful as conversation starters (rather than as argument starters). When parents and children are engaged in dicussions of values, meaningful, life-supporting materials can be generated for both. Children who are willing to question their parents in this way show a great deal of courage, self-confidence and curiosity. We ought to support it as best as we can even when it's hard, even when our own principles and values seem right and old and proven valuable. In this sense, even our car-issue has brought us closer, not only because we have to share one car more often, but also because we had to engage in a conversation that, rather than seeking agreement and congruence between parents and children, encourages position and op-position.