Mothers in Their Midlife Crisis Need a Road Trip. There’s Just One Small Hitch…

And it's all to do with the DVLA

Photo by William Christen on Unsplash

This week I was possibly the last woman in her forties to finish Miranda July’s smash hit ‘midlife crisis novel’ All Fours charting a woman’s (abortive) road trip across America. There’s no need for me to review it, because everyone else already has, but for the record I found it a rallying cry for idiosyncratic womanhood and it’s probably prompted me to give even fewer fucks. To everyone here who has messaged me over the past few months to recommend it, I offer thanks—you were correct in pairing it with this reader. If you see me pissing in a bush or gorging on junk food while sitting on a bench in Chiswick, you’ll know where I got my inspo.

Just by coincidence, this week I also opened a padded envelope which had been stacked in a close-to-toppling pile of books by my bed. In it was another title, this one called Breakdown, by Cathy Sweeney, plotting another disaffected mother’s drive away from her family. As she embarks on an odyssey of personal discovery, we’re prompted to question the instincts and expectations we’ve been raised to believe in. Breakdown was published a couple of months before All Fours and is a Sunday Times bestseller, suggesting that there’s definitely something in the water amongst us midlifers. At the very least, there are plenty of us lapping up the fantasy of walking out that door and doing whatever (or whoever) the hell we fancy.

As I’ve delved, I’ve found there’s a whole genre of mid-life, peri to menopausal mother centered literature circulating our bookstores right now and much of it is along the same throw off the chains and give into your deepest desires lines. It’s given me pause. We’re doubtless going to look back at this moment and analyse the incoherent polarisation in cultural perceptions of acceptable femininity. On one side we have tradwives and femosphere influencers instructing us to turn our backs on feminism and help build Gilead, while on the other end of the spectrum we’ve got women untethered and (at times) unhinged on sexual escapades, ditching their roles and responsibilities and pushing feminist thought to its brink. Extremes are so very much in vogue, that I’ve somewhat lost sight of the middle of the road.

On roads—lovely segue there—as I’ve immersed myself in these escapes from the martyrdom and self-denial in pursuit of our own desires, I’ve noticed the central role of driving in them. From jumping into the car without a plan to feeling the wind in your hair as you leave your past in the rearview mirror, driving has long served as an effective narrative device in literature. Shorthand for metaphorical shifts in identity as much as for a quest for freedom and escape, we often see transformations take place in books from the driver’s seat. They might revisit past traumas on these journeys or perhaps an awakening of some kind leading to a fresh slate and new address. During a drive you can happen upon all sorts of characters and scenarios, there’s often a sense of the new, unpredictable and even dangerous, while the changing landscape offers an opportunity to needle at social, cultural and environmental mores as well as the human condition itself. No wonder so many classics in both films, tv and literature feature road trips (off the top of my head, Mad Men, Easy Rider, On the Road, Into the Wild, Thelma & Louise, Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion…, add your faves below).

For me however, there has been a sense of discomfort, because, well…I can’t drive. This is not, may I add, due to a want of trying. I have completed more than 100, maybe 125 hours of driving lessons over my life, starting from when I was 18. I’ve passed my driving theory test six times (I have actually failed it too, but let’s not dwell) and six times have let it lapse without nailing the practical. Once I failed my driving test before I left the test centre and on another very nearly got stuck between width restriction bollards, requiring the examiner to ask me to step outside of the car and swap seats with her. I’ve been in a collision in a learner vehicle (I got rear-ended while stationary, but still), I’ve had Braxton Hicks contractions with an instructor looking on with concern, as well as more silent panic attacks in a car than I can count. Before you say it, I entreat you not to advise me to try an automatic as it’s very presumptuous. As if I was trying any of the above in a manual!