This should have been an exciting week in our house. A turned 16. It’s a day we’d looked forward to for years, the first of the 16, 18, 21 milestone birthdays. We looked forward to the measure of independence that it would bring A, as well as the time it would free up in our own schedules, as A could start driving the gang to school in the morning, and getting himself to work.

Instead, I’m sitting here, a muddled wreck trying to figure out how I am going to teach my new driver, without putting us both at risk, and potentially orphaning the other two kids. The answer is, obviously, I’m going to leave it to the professionals, and we’re going to take things a lot more slowly than we might have otherwise. None of us is very happy with the plan, but then again, we’re not happy with much these days.

A has always been a mature kid, wise beyond his years, so while I’m not worried about him in the driving too fast, being too reckless sense of things, I have this new level of worry about letting my kids out of my sight and my control for even a minute. Trying not to smother them as they’ve gone about the things they’ve always done has already been a challenge. The thought of putting the three of them together in a car and waving goodbye is unimaginable right now.

This is yet another battle I find myself wrestling with: living life to the fullest because you don’t know what tomorrow may bring, and holing up and doing nothing so that you stay safe. It’s hard enough to find a tolerable balance for myself, and downright impossible to apply it to lively, vibrant teenagers, without warping them for life.

What is most heartbreaking for me is that Steve was definitely looking forward to teaching A how to drive. We’d had many conversations about it, mostly me questioning how his already elevated blood pressure was going to handle being the passenger of a new driver. But Steve knew what it meant to be a 16-year-old boy and get the freedom that comes with having your own wheels, and I think he hoped that the experience would help bring the two of them closer together again. Not that they weren’t close, it’s just that A was currently going through that rebellious teenage period where your parents aren’t cool, and in fact, they’re just aggravating.

Now of course, everything is changed. A caught me off guard a few weeks ago when he made the statement, “I guess I’ll just use Dad’s car.” He’s right, of course, we have an extra vehicle just sitting in the driveway. We actually have two, as Steve had an older vehicle that he used as a hunting truck. G immediately piped up that he guessed that would eventually become his car. The practical part of me immediately agreed with their assessment. The emotional part of me wanted to put the brakes on those ideas immediately.

The few times over the last few months that I’ve had to drive either of what I consider “Steve’s cars” have been hard. I almost never drove the little car he used to make his two-hour daily commute, and I resisted driving the hunting truck as much as possible, usually because it was full of tools or hunting equipment, or stuff for the dogs. Moving all his stuff around to accommodate the kids’ stuff was more of a headache than it was worth and invariably ended with me “misplacing” something important.

It occurred to me the other week, as I was loading the back of my SUV with a load of firewood, that we no longer needed the third-row seat in my car, which was the one we always had to take when we went anywhere as a family. The four of us can now all fit in any of the cars.

The thought of downsizing drifted through my brain, but I remembered COVID birthdays, where we sat in the parking lot of our favorite restaurants and ate in the car, which was something Steve absolutely hated to do, but after the first year, it grew on him. I thought about our 12-hour drive to Maine last summer, when we didn’t realize that the Chick-fil-A that we preordered from was inside a shopping mall, and Steve had to navigate through the mall parking garage with the canoe on top and pulling the boat trailer behind. I thought about stopping for pizza at the place my dad had frequented in his college years, how there was no parking anywhere near the place. Steve ended up parking our entourage several blocks away and we had a pizza picnic on the boat before we got back on the road. I realized I won’t be trading in our family car full of memories any time soon.

At any rate, it’s going to be an interesting summer. We’ll be making lots of new car memories. Not the ones we expected to make, but I’m hoping that learning how to drive in his dad’s car will help keep their connection and Steve’s plans for him at least a little bit alive. I know I will be a poor substitute driving instructor, and I’m sure my own blood pressure is going to be a lot more elevated than when I was the “calm parent.” A also had the misfortune of being the first one to celebrate a “not-happy” birthday. We figured out how to do that together, so I’m sure we can handle the driving part, too.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.