Lao Tzu; ancient Chinese philosopher, founder of Taoism
Over the years our cars have been extensions of ourselves, increasing in size and status as our family and wherewithal have expanded. When we started dating I was still in high school and Michael used to transport me in his Triumph given to him by his revered grandpa. I still remember those heady days when Mike would stretch his hand across the gear-lever to hold my hand. Even his hand was handsome - long fingers with their slightly inverted tips now reinvented in Sebastian’s hands!
When we got married, Michael brought a furnished house and a car into our marriage; I poor university student that I was, contributed an electric sewing machine and an 50cc petrol scooter! We did in fact choose his very little 900cc Daihatsu Charade car together - ‘The Little Car’ - and it was the first of a number of beloved vehicles in which we had our first Southern African adventures together - to Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Namibia, Lesotho, game parks and to marathons across the Cape Province. We’d toss our hiking and camping gear in the back and literally drive in to the sunset. For the four years we had it, we would be doused with wedding confetti that would belch out of the air vents – sprinkled there by Mike’s sisters. We did 120 000 kms in 4 years before it protested spluttering to an early demise. ‘The little car’ was joined by ‘Agatha’, a 21 year old Ford Escort in which Mike would pile his cross-county team to take them to Table Mountain for training. The back door couldn’t open so the runners would clamber out of the window to embark on their weekly run on the Kirstenbosch contour paths. It was symbol of a simple lifestyle and freedom –without being bound by legal boundaries of quotas and rules by which we now live. How times have changed!
When we moved to Canada, we purchased a new vehicle, a trusty Mitsubishi, with an additional 2 seats for grandparents’ visits and the children’s friends. Our Mitsubishi provided us with so many happy family times – Cameron learned to read on our daily commute; Erin played complicated games of ‘I spy with my little eye’ (with non-spy-able items); we all learned French songs on the way to her French Immersion School and we had uninterrupted time reviewing our days together. In our first year in Canada we drove for 5 weeks across Canada and back taking in our beautiful new homeland – the Sunshine Coast, Rockies, the glowing dawn across the prairies, the Great Lakes, the tree-lined highways of Ontario, Quebec, Toronto and the gracious city of Ottawa which houses Mike’s Canadian family…all the way to the east coast of New Brunswick and back again with the children playing hide-and-seek under a blanket in the back seat. Our commitment to being a one-car family on arrival in Canada was swiftly set aside and the Mitsubishi was joined by a ‘nanny car’ for our resident Czech Republic au pair, Linda. When Lovely Linda left our family, the Little Car (II) became my main mode of transport as Head of School for my daily 3-hour round-trip commute. It had a short 3-year reprieve and was put on blocks as we dabbled, in fleeting footloose and fanciful freedom, with a black Audi TT sports car, reminiscent of the British racing green MGF sports car we briefly owned in England in our child-free days. Cameron and Erin would huddle in the low-slung seats in the back their heads almost touching the roof. It found a new owner in the same week as we found a new home and the twins arrived - an era over.
This year the Mitsubishi passed the 270 000 kilometer mark and was beginning to falter; it had left me stranded mid-winter with the three children in the back for two hours. It had to go. With a proposed change-over of car came the renewed realization that it is not ‘just a car’; the vehicles we’ve owned reflect so much of who we are, the stages of our lives and encapsulated memories. Each vehicle evokes complicated emotions of fondness or frustration; each has a life of its own. In the days after we lost Erin, I cleaned out the Mitsubishi. In the door-well were remnants of her pizza crusts, her penknife carved with her name from our recent summer visit to Yellowstone National Park, and in the seat pocket all her hair accoutrements for a quick hair rescue. It was agonizing to realise that those moments were gone, her car messiness a thing of the past. Taking out her booster seat, under which were sweet wrappers and crayons, was a soul-wrenching act reinforcing that she was no longer a daily part of our family commute.
And so it was that in January 2017 our Mitsubishi, in which we’d had so many north American adventures, was traded in for a more comfortable and spacious 7-seater SUV for our expanded family and visiting friends. Erin‘s booster seat has been traded for 2 baby-carriers; the pinning down of two wriggling toddlers while endeavouring to dig out and connect 3 separate complicated seat belt parts has to be one of the most taxing aspects of twin parenting. The vehicle change-over has reinforced the complicated paradox of our reformed family. The space in our car is filled again for new memories, new adventures, new messiness. Time moves on relentlessly, dispassionately: we have new children, a new home and now a new car. Just as our physical cells replicate, recreating ourselves as completely new physical human beings over the decades, so our life experiences and relationships are shifting sands, readjustments, altered nuances. What once was, is transformed over time into something quite different.
And so it is with grief; it calls for the setting aside of nostalgia, memories and the heart-felt tugs on the soul to dwell in the past, with an ever-urgent demand to pay attention to the present. Almost 3 years on we can no longer imagine what Erin might have enthused about, who her friends might be or how she might be doing in school because too much has changed…She would be too changed, just as we are.
And yet, still every time I struggle with those toddlers’ seatbelts, I am reminded that Erin was launched on the road to independence and can hear her quiet insistence as she resolutely plugged in her seatbelt herself: ‘I can do it by myself, Mama’.
I love you Erin, in my heart every hour of every day even if life relentlessly moves on…