We purchased a Honda Odyssey Touring, on Halloween 2007, when the dream of having 3 kids was just beginning to unfurl in my womb. It was an act of planning for the 5 that we would become the following April. And now that I look back on it, it felt like another costume we were donning. It didn't seem real, the kind of car that I or my family could possibly own.
At first, owning a minivan felt symptomatic of a larger transformation into petty-bourgeois, thirty-something parenthood. And I for one felt slightly sick because of it. What had/has happened to my youth?
After all, we sold our precious time to buy a moving box with automatic doors and 7 seats. But, oh those seats are heated. We have a retractable moon roof and tires that will drive for miles and miles even if one of the kids puts a nail in them. The car has so many air bags that if it decides to do a pirouette over the guardrail of an overpass it will encompass us all in pillows that inflate at 1/20 of a second. The car really is a marvel. But it is also the emblem of The Soccer Mom, The Suburban Family, and the ultimate death of cool.
But so are living in the 'burbs and having 3 kids. Why do I care? Part of me really had a hard time with this minivan and the demographic it consigned me to. In fact, within the first 6 months of buying the minivan I searched for a hint that I was not the ultimate joiner of the middle-class, near middle-aged nexus of people on conveyer belts who pop kids out between working jobs with ever increasing responsibility just to pay the bills for the minivans they buy.
Really, in my hippy college days this whole concept was light years away. And even through my twenties. I wanted to love and be loved and find self-expression. Now more than halfway through my thirties I am a respectable citizen with a minivan to prove it. And I am mostly on a conveyer belt, even if I like to think I drive the minivan. Sometimes, or most of the time, it still drives me.
But fuck this! That is probably why I went on a communication binge for 6 months after I purchased the minivan, whereby I started phoning, emailing, and Facebooking friends, acquaintances and ex-lovers, anyone who could remind me of who I used to be. I wanted to remember a time when life was not so regimented, when I could go out for a drink and stay out. When I could explore the world freely and taste, drink, smoke or do more or less what or whomever I liked without any horrible fear of unraveling, and the repercussions of stopping the conveyer belt.
Though I still like to think of myself as someone with a deeply bohemian take on life, the fact of the matter is that having children, if not also being happily married has cemented my fate, at least for now. It has been about 15 years since I did the things in the paragraph above with wild abandon. And I am happier, steadier, arguably more creative, and certainly a better person than I was before. So, if all that comes decorated in a heap of steal otherwise known as an Odyssey, I'll buy one again any time, thank you very much. But I can do without the conveyer belt--that mechanized, automatic, unrelenting passage side to my life. Can I dismantle it and keep on driving?
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