My husband recently acquired his license.  No, I am not married to a 16 year old.  Sickos.  And really, living in the suburbs of Chicago you can actually get around quite nicely without a license or a car.  We live down the street from a train station and have our choice of several bus routes to get us around.  Not that I ever use these things.  Hah!  I have my license. 

My husband has epilepsy, and for that reason he wasn’t able to get a license.  He had a doctor that thought that it was a bad idea, then he had another doctor that was just…well, he was a jerk who insisted that my husband was crazy.  The doctor after that changed hospitals before my husband had been going to him for a year, but on the bright side changed his medicine to something different and it worked out quite well.  The doctor my husband goes to now wouldn’t give him permission to get a license until he went a year without seizures. 

So, finally all of the stars aligned and his doctor gave him permission to get a license.  As a wonderful turn of events this all happened around the same time that I had to go and get mine renewed (woo hoo for 10 years without a ticket).  We ended up getting up at the ass crack of dawn one day so that we could be standing in line and the first ones into the hell dimension known as the DMV so that we could get in and out of there as quickly as possible.  There was also the added hope that my husband would be one of the first people that a test instructor would be in a car with and therefor in a better mood than if we had come, say around lunch time after he’s had to deal with maybe a dozen people who really shouldn’t be behind the wheel of a vehicle. 

Let me say that the people who work at the DMV put up with a hell of a lot more in one hour than I think I would be willing to deal with in a lifetime.  At 8:30 on a Thursday morning a clerk was already being berated by a man who didn’t have everything he needed in order to renew his license.  As if his being unprepared is somehow her fault.  As far as I could tell she was not his wife nor his mother, and since this man was all grown up I think it was most likely his responsibility to read the letter he got in the mail telling him what he would need in order to renew his license.  Instead he blamed the clerk.  Who then had the job of helping my husband while I was with the clerk next to the poor woman who was getting her head chewed off by this asshat. 

So long story short (yeah I know, too late), these kind and wonderful people gave my husband permission to drive.  Now, I’ve been the driver the whole time my husband and I have been together.  I drove everywhere.  I could not go out with my husband and have a drink with dinner because I would have to drive us home.  If we went to a party, I couldn’t drink.  I realize that my sole focus is drinking and it makes me sound like some kind of raving alchoholic, but I’m not, I was just deprived and restricted to drinking in my own home and since my husband doesn’t drink it makes for a kind of lonely drinking existence.  My husband was a passenger seat driver, and I think a lot of my road rage came from him trying to tell me how to drive when he wasn’t the one behind the wheel and dealing with the idiots day in and day out.  But now he knows. 

Now he knows why I would get so angry.  Now he knows why I always wanted to drink.  Now I’m the one sitting in the passenger seat.  And I kind of like it.  Actually, more than kind of, I love the freaking freedom that comes with not being the one who has to drive all the time.  I get to talk on my phone and not have to drop it because some idiot cut me off.  I can check my text messages when they come in instead of an hour later when I finally remember that I got one while I was driving.  I can read the mail if I want to.  Or I can just look out the window and take in the sights and notice things that I didn’t get to notice before because I was too busy staring at the car in front of me hoping that it wouldn’t slam on it’s brakes for no reason whatsoever.  I let him drive everywhere now, just because I can.  I really do think that this will help me to love driving again, because I was really starting to hate it for a little while there.  And if it doesn’t help me to love driving again, at least I know that I’ll be able to have that margarita with dinner after all.