Are we there yet?

My parents' divorced when I was three. No worries, it's the norm for me. My mom moved back to Austin and my dad stayed in Houston. The biweekly drives took forever.

Thinking of family just makes me think of driving. No matter who I was going to see, we were always driving. Whether it was driving to meet my Dad at Lagrange or driving to South Austin off Slaughter to visit my aunt, the car was our way to get to family. Looking back, Pflugerville to Slaughter is nothing, but everytime we had family reunions at my aunt Gigi's house I dreaded the drive. The only thing that ever seemed to make it go by faster was music. Now, I didn't always get my way because I liked pop music when I was a kid and my parents are "rockers". There were a lot of fights in the car when I couldn't listen to what I wanted to, but when the tears came I usually ended up getting my way. When I could listen to my music I would make up dances in my head and it would seem as though it only took a couple of minutes to get to our destination.

The drive to Houston was the most frequent, and the most memorable. Driving there every other weekend, sometimes every weekend, kind of made it stick in my memory. I remember the country roads we would drive down, and how the country turned into forests, which eventually turned into city. My stepdad was usually the one to take me to meet my dad. These felt like depths of hell because of all the chain smoking he did. He wanted to listen to music that I thought was annoying, and my music was stupid to him. Eventually I would just close my eyes and try to sleep through the dreadful smell of cigarette smoke. Occasionally i would catch a break and my mom would drive. Thank God. She let me listen to my music, and she wouldn't smoke.

Driving makes me think of family. No one in my family lives in a different state, but we still don't live two seconds away from each other either. Family is important and the means to getting there doesn't seem such a hassle anymore. Now driving to Houston takes only 20 minutes in my eyes.