Ordinary Love in a Buick Sedan

Learning to love through the mundane - a piece written in summer of '24

It’s Middlest’s day off today. She’s away from home this summer, working as a counselor at a literacy camp for underprivileged kids with mental, emotional, and behavioral disabilities. She’s staying with her grandmother. “Mimi” turns 88 this year, and her memory has begun to fade. She can’t remember if she’s taken her medicine, eaten breakfast, drunk water. Middle daughter will be 18 in October, and she’s full of life: she paints, writes music, memorizes Shakespeare, and enrolls in challenging college courses like Ornithology, “So I can paint birds better.”

But now, it’s the summer before her senior year of high school, and instead of vacation, she has a summer full of service: living with Mimi; working as a camp counselor. On some objectively undefinable level, that means suffering and sacrifice.

You remember those camp counselor days: Young campers require energy, creativity, and infinite patience. It’s hot, everyone’s moody, and everyone—EVERYONE—struggles to pay attention. Camp starts at 7:30 in the morning and ends at 6 p.m., but ministry for middle daughter doesn’t begin and end with camp hours. Her Mimi needs her to exercise understanding, tenderness…and infinite patience. In both cases she must engage as a responsible adult, but without many of the privileges that come with that status.

Like a driver’s license.

Middle daughter endured multiple interruptions to her driver’s ed process. COVID pandemic lockdowns and our family’s multiple moves (due to job loss) during the 2020-2022 period caused interruption and delay. These setbacks caused her almost two years, derailing her from the normal schedule for obtaining a driver’s license. She’s been limping around at seventeen with a “Teen Level One License”—the North Carolina equivalent to a driver’s permit. It’s the lowest of the low, making it harder to get a job, harder to get to college classes, harder in general to be a teenager in the United States of America. Now that we live in a rural area, a half hour from her closest good buddies, the most painful hardship is the loss of community, particularly since oldest sister, best friend, and chaffeuse has left the nest.

Thus began a summer’s symbiotic relationship between the beautifully odd couple: my mother-in-law and our second born. Mimi needs companionship; Daughter needs a job, a place to stay, a car. Mom shouldn’t be driving, so the “girls” (at 87 and 17) drive around town together…in a gold Buick Park Avenue.

Today is supposed to be her day off. She slept in, anticipating time with a good friend, dinner with her boyfriend—the sweet benefits of adolescence. But Mimi has already lost the sticker showing she’d had the car inspected, and since the car’s registration expired over six months ago, she needs help. Enter another interruption for daughter no. 2.

For many, the mundanity of this situation makes it too ordinary for words. Perhaps some would read this and emit snarky comments like “first world problems” or “welcome to the real world of adulting.” But these things deserve more than our cynicism. They deserve our recognition, encouragement, even praise. Most of our expressions of loving-kindness and acts of service come in everyday, hidden things. Consider how vital it is, then, for us to affirm our adolescents as they practice these ordinary, wholesome, yet beautiful ways of loving.

Our most-middle-daughter is learning those things today, on her day off. I couldn’t be more delighted at her smooth handling of herself, her relationships with others, and the “bussin’” Buick that’s her current ride.