Marissa Stapley’s most recent novel is The Lightning Bottles. The adaption of her novel Lucky will stream on Apple TV in 2026.
Into Giants by Patrick Watson was playing as I waited nervously at the intersection, my teenage daughter sitting in the passenger seat. The song was part of a seven-hour long “Driving Music” playlist I’d recently made – no matter that I hadn’t even yet managed to drive around the block by myself. I turned our Toyota Highlander and accelerated as the melody swelled. If you’ve heard the song, you know the moment I mean: it’s the part that lifts and lifts until it feels like the soundtrack to your own life, but only if you’d done something extraordinary. Which I just had, by managing to turn left without having a panic attack.
This was, somehow, a triumph more than 30 years in the making.
At 16, I was too busy riding shotgun in my boyfriend’s red sports car to bother getting a driver’s licence of my own. He would wash that car with reverence and we’d drive from Stouffville to Wasaga Beach. Once, while sitting on the trunk looking out at Lake Huron, I idly ran a sand-covered foot across the bumper and left behind a constellation of scratches. I think the fight that caused was the beginning of the end for us, but instead of getting my licence after we broke up, I moved to Toronto to live with my mom. With the subway so close, I had a new reason not to learn to drive.
Years later, when I was pregnant with our first child, my husband – rightly envisioning years of ferrying the kids to practices and lessons, with me still riding shotgun – tried to teach me on his Volkswagen, which had a manual transmission. My belly got in the way of the stick shift, our bickering bordered on catastrophic, and eventually I gave up and focused on motherhood and writing. Then came the years of strollers, toddlers, car seats, and dependence, on my husband, my parents, kind friends who shuttled me and my children around Toronto.
I want you to know I wasn’t complacent about this. I tried to get my licence a few times. I took lessons, I failed tests. Soon, it became a funny story I’d tell at dinner parties. There was the time a friend thought maybe if I took half a Xanax, I might be less nervous during my test. (Do not recommend. Likely illegal.) The time I failed a test in January and my instructor at the time was so incensed that I had taken him out of the running for the pool he’d organized with the other instructors to see who could go the furthest into the new year without a failed student that he refused to speak to me on the drive home. The time, mid-test, when the examiner asked me to complete a turn at a light “when it was safe to do so” and my nerves caused me to miss that last part. I immediately crossed two lanes of traffic without so much as checking my blind spot; she then asked me to pull over so she could drive us back to the DMV.
But also, there were the stories I didn’t like to tell. Like when I panicked and stopped while trying to merge onto the Lakeshore, my family in the car. After that, I told myself it wasn’t just that I couldn’t drive, it was that I shouldn’t. I was a danger to the people I loved most. I let my G1 licence expire.
My dad had driven me to one of my failed tests – maybe the third, maybe the fifth, maybe the seventh; yes, there were that many attempts – and afterward, he said gently, “If you really wanted this, I think you’d have done it by now.” He wasn’t wrong. I’d built a life that suggested I could achieve anything I set my mind to. Why not this?
For years I told myself I didn’t need to drive, that wanting to had nothing to do with it. I lived in the city. I took the subway. I walked. It made me healthier. It was a sort of endearing thing about me, the quirky one in our friend group. But underneath that practicality was a fear I hadn’t yet learned to call anxiety, or understand wasn’t something I had to live with, day in, day out, forever.
What finally brought the extent of my anxiety into sharp relief wasn’t therapy, self-help books, or even Instagram reels – it was my daughter. We diagnosed her anxiety, and there it was: my own. Mothers blame ourselves for almost everything our children struggle with or carry too heavily, but I knew, watching her face her own sometimes crippling fears, that there was a clear path along which to trace them back to. It led to me.
Yet when she turned 16, and made no move to get her licence, I only felt relief. Which wasn’t fair to her – I was scared for both of us, projecting fears that I knew all too well could haunt her for life. If I couldn’t model courage, how could I ask it of her? Driving isn’t scary, I insisted – but it was. I was terrified. And this had made me frustratingly dependent on others in a way women who live in our country are not required to be. My dad was right: I didn’t want to drive and never had. But for the first time, I was starting to understand I might need to learn how anyway.
In 2023, we bought a cottage in Haliburton, a place that was the true culmination of years of hard work and abject determination on my part, in an industry – publishing – where success is almost always hard won. I coasted on that triumph for a while, nested in our happy place, even as I knew that the isolation of the cottage and the not being a driver piece of my life were at cross purposes with each other. Most people I know love being invited to cottages, though, so it wasn’t hard to find friends to invite who would also act as my chauffeur.
I spent a lot of time alone, working on novels, while the neighbours reacted with gentle horror to my car-less existence in such a stark, rural setting. “If you ever need anything, just come to us,” they said, leaving unsaid how many things could happen when you were alone, in the middle of nowhere. Not being a driver started to feel irresponsible.
One July afternoon in 2024, my son – 17, strong and healthy – was suddenly doubled over, unable to move, his eyes wild with fear and pain. My husband, who had just left the cottage to drive back to the city, was still within cell range to receive my frantic call and came speeding back. I hate to think of what could have happened if he wasn’t; it had been mere moments between our son being well and catastrophically ill. We rushed him to meet the ambulance at the market down the road. At the small Haliburton hospital, they did every test they could, transported him via another ambulance to a bigger hospital. In the end, it was a staph infection he recovered from just as quickly as he had developed it. But I couldn’t get it out of my head, that feeling of abject helplessness in the moments we were alone.
So, that fall, at the age of 46, I redid my written test and started driving lessons again. I came home from each session wrung out, as if I’d run a marathon. I was always nervous, and this caused me to fail to shoulder-check, forget to signal, slow down when changing lanes. My new instructor was patient and kind, but often looked at me wearily, sighing as if to say, you’re testing the limits of my saintliness more than any student ever has.
When it came time to book the G2 test, the only date available was my daughter’s 17th birthday. I took it as a good sign, though I also worried about ruining her day if I failed again. It struck me that I had spent a lot of time telling my children how proud I was of them. Now, I was in a position to earn my daughter’s pride – and I wanted it. “I’ll be proud of you just for trying,” she told me.
The morning of the test, which I had booked at the examination centre closest to our cottage, I realized I’d left my G1 licence back home in Toronto. It felt like classic bit of self-sabotage, and I wondered if my subconscious was going to win in the end. Then came the surge of determination that has carried me through many objectively harder moments. I heard my dad say, If you really wanted this, you would have it. I asked my husband to drive me to the closest Service Ontario, where I secured a temporary replacement licence, and made it to the drive test centre, with moments to spare, coasting on adrenalin.
When the examiner told me to pull out of my parking spot to begin the test, nothing happened. Because the car was still in park. When I admitted the depths of my nervousness, he said something along the lines of, oh really, I couldn’t tell. We both laughed, and I began. My son, now 18, who had gotten his licence the year before, had given me a useful piece of driving test advice: narrate everything you do so the examiner knows you’re checking mirrors, blind spots, signals. But my jitters meant I narrated my internal monologue, too. “Turning right, hoping not to drive over the curb,” I muttered. The examiner chuckled again. Later, when we returned to the parking lot, he grinned and said, “Congratulations. You passed!” I asked him if he was sure and he said I should get out of the car before he changed his mind.
I stood in the sunlight, holding that yellow slip of paper in my hands, and I felt transformed, free from my anxiety, all my many fears. Soon, my daughter would feel the same, because I had blazed the trail.
It didn’t last. When it came to me and driving, there still existed within me a calcified layer of trepidation that wouldn’t go away. I had imagined myself on open roads, windows down, hair blowing, scarf fluttering like a movie heroine’s. It turned out I still preferred the passenger seat. Highways still terrified me. Even side streets made my palms sweat. I never made it past the first two or three songs of that epic “Driving Music” playlist I had so painstakingly created.
One autumn morning, my son called from university with a request. Could I pick him up from the train station that afternoon? I almost called him an Uber, my default non-driver survival move, but changed my mind. As I eased down our narrow Toronto alley, playlist on, We Float by PJ Harvey poured from the speakers, and while I wasn’t going fast enough to feel the wind in my hair, I did feel remarkably unfettered. By the time I arrived at the train station, just a few blocks away, Peace Frog by The Doors blared from the speakers and I felt like one of those cool moms I had always admired. At 46, I was driving to pick up one of my children for the very first time. It’s a feeling many take for granted, I’m sure, one more responsibility piled atop many others. But it was a responsibility I had never known, and I swear, I almost wept from the joy of it.
And, yet, even this was fleeting. Turning left scared me. When I did drive, I often concocted elaborate routes to avoid ever doing it. But one night, my daughter needed a certain art supply for school and asked me to drive her to get it. I said it would have to wait until her dad got home, because that plaza required a non-negotiable left turn – and it felt like such a failure to admit this. That summer morning in Haliburton was in my rear-view mirror now. I had passed my driving test and still failed to set the good, brave example that had been my entire purpose. “I’ll do it,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I’ll drive us.”
Sweaty palms, tingling legs, racing mind – and that Patrick Watson song on my playlist, with its rising chords and lyrics about carrying our love in cups to go, growing so tall our heads hit the ceilings.
That stubborn girl, the one who had refused to get her licence just because – and then, because – the one who had been in lockstep beside me as we marched toward the achievement of my most truly audacious dreams, she made the left turn.
The music swelled, my daughter looked at me like I had just done something amazing, and I knew that I really had. I was a hero at a stoplight, a person who could prove her love to someone just by taking her foot off the brake, just by finally letting go.
Road sign photo illustrations: The Globe and Mail. Source photos: Getty Images