Our 14-year-old got his driver’s permit last week. OUR BABY WHO RECENTLY PAINTED A SUN VISOR FOR HIS PRESCHOOL GRADUATION TO WEAR WITH HIS LIGHT-UP VELCRO SNEAKERS IS LEGALLY ABLE TO OPERATE A MOTOR VEHICLE LARGER THAN ONE OF THOSE BATTERY-POWERED JEEPS YOU GET OFF THE SHELF AT TARGET. I don’t know how this happened.
While I don’t know how this happened, I do know how it happened.
A couple of months ago, I went to the North Dakota Department of Transportation website and registered Fourteen for a permit appointment. North Dakota drivers can get their permits at 14 and their drivers licenses at 15, and my friends with older children had warned me that the best practice was to get said permit as close to Fourteen’s 14th birthday as possible – it’s common for kids to take the permit test on their exact birthday – so that he could take driver’s ed next summer and walk out of that “Caution: Student Driver Car” and into his “Caution: NEW DRIVER WHOSE MOTHER LOVES HIM Car” right away.
“I don’t want to get my driver’s license,” Fourteen said when I told him I had made the appointment.
“Why not?” Kyle asked.
“Because I don’t feel like it,” Fourteen, our most cautious child, said.
“You might not feel like it now,” I said, “but you may feel like it next year, and you need your permit this year in order to get your license next year. Even if you still don’t want your license next summer, we can still spend this year teaching you how to drive.”
“Fine,” Fourteen said, probably to get me to stop talking.
In addition to setting up the appointment, I got him the 50-page permit study guide and texted him a stack of online practice tests. I also started a daily countdown starting two weeks before the test.
“Your test is in fifteen days,” I’d say at dinnertime.
“Yeah,” he’d say.
The week before his scheduled test, I discovered that he could take his permit test online from the comfort of our home.
“Your test is in 7 days,” I told him over hamburgers. “Do you want to take the test here at home, or at the DMV?”
“Home,” Fourteen said. “So-and-so said the DMV is rough.”
“How so?” I asked.
“You go in a room and they stare at you until you’re done,” he said.
“You’re going to go into my office and I’m going to stare at you in there,” I said.
“You always stare at me,” he said. “So that’s fine.”
The next evening, I asked him if he wanted to take his permit test (the online version can be taken anytime) and he said no.
“I’ll take it tomorrow,” he said.
To my surprise, he took it the next day.
Getting registered for the online test took longer than expected because there were a lot of tricky questions like, “Do you wear glasses” and “Have you ever had a driver’s license” which temporarily stumped Fourteen. Part of the registration required me to agree to be his moderator, and so I sat in the green corduroy armchair next to my desk and pretended to scroll TikTok while side-eyeing the screen as he tested.
“Did you study?” I asked him as he clicked “No, I have never had a driver’s license.”
“Yeah,” he said, incredulously, because OBVIOUSLY he had studied even though his dad and I had zero proof of that happening.
Here’s the long and the short of it: he passed. Here’s the other long and the short of it: I don’t think I would have passed. Sixty-percent of the answers he clicked I thought to myself, “Well, that’s wrong” and he was right. There were two questions about how many feet you should be away from the car in front of you during certain conditions – the options for both were one hundred feet, three hundred feet, or five hundred feet – and not only can I not remember the correct answers, I can’t even remember the questions. I’ve only had a license for 30 years; I can’t be expected to know facts about driving.
We had to restart the test because I had family photos on the wall behind him and the computer thought it was a whole bunch of his ancestors helping him cheat. After a call to the testing company and the confirmation (via random screenshots taken by the program during the test) that he wasn’t cheating, he continued on. He had been on his way to passing the permit test when it first errored out and then he passed it again after the restart, so he ended the exam double legit.
On the day of his appointment, we took his test certificate, his birth certificate, his passport, and two bills to the DMV and they gave him a Real ID permit. He needed to fill out another form to make all of this happen.
A few hours prior (or eight years ago), at the first session of Gearing Up for Kindergarten, Fourteen had been asked to write his name on the teacher’s sign-up sheet.
“Okay, buddy,” I had said, “Remember: to make an ‘A’ we go up the mountain, and down the mountain, and across the mountain.”
Filling out that form in the DMV had a similar vibe.
“Okay, babes,” I said in the DMV. “You need to sign, not write, your name so that people can check your signature on your ID. Right here on the line.”
And then that was that. He was pretty pumped in as much as a 14-year-old can be pumped in front of his mother.
Fourteen has driven once in the days following, in the empty parking lot at the baseball fields, with his dad in the passenger seat. He did well – or, at least, as well as I could tell because I was in the backseat with my eyes closed, thinking about how he used to sing, “Take me out to the bawlll game” at the top of his lungs at that same field not two hours (or 11 years) ago.
Fourteen is in that giant mass of boys above. It was taken at a hockey camp. All of that hair will soon be on our roadways; Lord, give us strength.
I wasn’t on ND Today this week because I was on vacation! Last week on North Dakota Today we talked about Wendy and Olivia, my Nice People of the Week, as well a community coming together to get kids to school. (Valley News Live)
In North Dakota-adjacent news, the town of Swanville, Minnesota gives all of their graduating seniors college scholarships. (Facebook)
Minot’s Prairie Grit Therapy is looking for stylists to provide back-to-school haircuts to kids in a sensory-friendly environment. (KFYR TV)
Fargo’s Emily Vaagene and Greg Schlangen, and Grand Forks’ Madilyn Waldal were honored for saving a man’s life on St. Patrick’s Day. (Grand Forks Herald)
The Magic City Lions Club just got a little bit more magical. (KX Net)
Child care centers around North Dakota are growing their own food this summer thanks to a statewide grant. (Fargo Forum)
Minot’s Brianna Helsene is the top female clay target shooter in the nation. (Grand Forks Herald)
North Dakota Nice 
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