I have a habit of losing—or should I say, misplacing—things. I’d like to blame this on having kids, but this has pretty much been my norm since birth. Recently, I misplaced the keys to my vehicle somewhere between the driveway and the front door. I was worried someone would steal my car. Until I remembered. I drive a minivan.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not going to be a post filled with self-loathing or half-baked excuses. I am proud of my minivan. In fact, it is my favorite car ever. It’s black outside, leather inside, has a DVD player, seat warmers, and remote control doors. I sit high above all the other cars on the road. It is a sweet ride.
At least to me. I have a good friend who recently had her third child too. Minivans are such anathema to her that she can’t help telling me how much she hates them every time I see her. She bought some kind of Volvo SUV for herself and got all new Sunshine car seats, crammed together in the second row. But she did buy a used minivan for her nanny, which she would like to bumper sticker with “Only my nanny drives this minivan”. And she asked me, can you imagine anything worse than a used minivan?
Actually, I can. When I first moved to California, in a wicked El Nino winter, I had a rental so small that I thought I might float away in a highway puddle. I would never want that again. And I would hate any white car because I just don’t wash my cars enough (or should I say ever). I’d also not be too fond of a Vespa because no matter how cute I think they are, I would probably fall off. Helmets make me dizzy.
To me, a minivan is a thing of beauty, a thing of promise. It speaks of big families, noisy kids, road trips and baseball teams. I remember when we first got our minivan, when I was still pregnant with Jay, I would just love looking at those three car seats in the back and the way way back, imagining all the good times we’d have in what the big kids had already named “The Mystery Machine”.
I asked another minivan-hating friend over dinner tonight at a decidedly unhip pizza joint just what was so awful about minivans. She explained that minivans are just really, really dorky. And used minivans are disgusting because you just imagine all the gross things that kids have done in the minivan before you bought it. Maybe she has a point there. My minivan, not yet a year old, has already been scribbled on and peed in. There is some unidentified sticky stuff in Annie’s side pocket and Danny has already broken the top off of a compartment near him. Jay’s car seat is undoubtedly creasing the leather seat. I myself may have ground some whole wheat pretzels into the carpet.
But still I love my minivan. Maybe it is because my definition of cool has shifted so dramatically since having kids. I have to admit it: being called a soccer mom would be a compliment to me because it would mean I was pulling this whole STORK thing off, that I was both having a career and making cookies. For me, having a minivan, is not about settling or doing something out of practicality. I embrace my minivan because I embrace this big, clunky life that I have chosen. I drive it out of love.
Plus, like my husband says, if there was ever a true catastrophe, we could all live comfortably in our car. Now that, my friends, is cool.
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