I thought I had done a pretty good job teaching A to drive. With a late spring birthday, no school, and great weather, his first few months of driving were relatively calm. We had lots of time to practice, and the trip to and from his summer job had enough different routes that we got to experience a variety of types of driving just about every day.

Then school started back up, and life happened, and it took him almost to the expiration of his permit to finally get his hours and training in and get his license. I failed to take into consideration that due to that delay, less than a year later, I’d have to have G behind the wheel, and we’d be starting the whole process again.

Starting this saga in the middle of winter, and with a kid that plays two varsity sports, has been a bit of a challenge.

No, that’s an understatement.

It’s flat out making me crazy.

On top of that, the differences in A and G’s personalities are not making this process any easier.

A’s thought process closely mimics mine.

As we would drive, I would sort of “word vomit” lots of little driving tidbits. For example, “I’m coming up to an intersection, yes I know I have the right of way, but you can never trust people to stop at stop signs, so pay attention to who is pulling up, and be prepared to react.”

One of my least favorite intersections is one that we have to go through multiple times a day. As we would approach the intersection, I would start spouting all the things that A needed to start doing, putting his turn signal on, tapping the breaks to grab the attention of drivers behind him, looking at the parking lot of the restaurant that is on the other side of the intersection for cars pulling out, and on and on. A absorbs information that way, so the “word vomit” process was very helpful to him.

G, on the other hand, does not respond well to that.

“Mom, can you just please be quiet and let me think!” has been a frequent request. The response is usually “No, I can’t because you don’t have time to think, there’s a tractor trailer coming at us.”

In the meantime, he’s usually adequately responding and maneuvering the car, but he just wants to be left alone to do it in peace and quiet. He also doesn’t realize that I talk when I’m nervous, so he’s not just getting helpful driving hints, I’m trying to keep calm and let him drive on.

G has a lot of experience driving tractors and other equipment around the farm, so he has a little bit more of a base to draw on, and for a while I was worried that he would become overconfident. Instead, it seems to have made him more cautious.

That’s not a bad thing, but when you’re used to driving a tractor that couldn’t go 20 mph if you had your foot to the floor, 35 mph in a car seems like flying to him.

I find myself frequently reminding him that the speed limit is about 15 mph faster than he’s currently driving.

Finally, it seems like every time we make plans to have G do some driving, the weather doesn’t cooperate. One night, he said to me, “we may as well get this over with” and so out we went. I don’t mind driving in just about any weather.

My dad did a really good job of preparing me for winter driving, and after years of driving a stick shift, I’m fairly adept at using low gears to navigate through just about anything.

I realize, all these years later, what an incredible gift it was for my dad to take me out in all kinds of weather and send the car into a slide or a spin and have me navigate my way out of it. I wanted to try to do the same for the boys.

But, let’s face it, I’m also extremely averse to risk taking these days, so we stuck to the main roads that had been well treated, took our time, and tried not to end up flying off the side of the road every time another vehicle passed us.

Through my years of coaching and instructing, I’ve learned about the different ways that people learn. Through teaching my kids how to drive, I’ve also learned that most people can only teach one way, unless of course, you’re professionally trained to teach to a variety of audiences.

Even then, though, I’d be willing to bet that if you’re teaching in the “I’ve got a teenage driver” panic mode, you probably resort to your preferred method of teaching.

While I have no doubt that we will survive Teen Driver Part II, and G will be a perfectly competent driver, it turns out that I was overconfident in my abilities to calmly navigate this process.

In the meantime, I’m trying to enjoy getting to reconnect with G, and eventually, when I don’t have to give him quite so much instruction, I look forward to using our car time to have other conversations.

Since I don’t see A nearly as much as I used to, now that he’s driving on his own, I’ve realized that those 65 hours of required driving time also gave us a lot of time to talk, uninterrupted by the other siblings.

The standard rule of “no fighting while we’re driving” also gives us a chance to talk calmly about subjects that might get heated otherwise.

At the end of all of this, G will have his license, and I will end up with some pretty good memories.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears weekly in the Times News.