The Story of a Minivan

Eleven years ago, I sat behind the wheel of a minivan for the first time. I pushed back the seat to make room for my belly and adjusted the mirror so I could check on my two-year-old daughter sitting in a carseat in the back.
“What do you think?”
Eva popped her thumb out of her mouth. “Good,” she said, and stuck her thumb back in.
Toby, sitting in the passenger seat, eyed me skeptically. “I’m still just not sure about the whole minivan thing.”
I rubbed my belly, swollen with baby #2. “I think we’re the definition of the whole minivan thing.”
And so, in a used car lot in Virginia, we traded in my Subaru Wagon, bought for driving up to Tahoe to ski with friends on the weekends, for a two-year-old Toyota Sienna, bought for carseats and carpools.
“Let’s name her Cara,” Eva said. So we did.

I’m not the type of person who cares about cars. If you’ve seen Cara, you already know that about me. Her hubcaps are missing, the visor has been replaced (with a tan visor that doesn’t match the gray interior), and her upholstery is basically made of Pirate’s Booty at this point. But since the day we drove out of the parking lot of that dealership, we have lived in five different houses in three different states (and one District), but she’s been with us since before Lucy was born, which may explain why I felt nostalgic about trading her in for a new car today.

We have a lot of memories in that car. Not all of them are great. If the soundtrack to my Subaru was a Pearl Jam’s Ten, the soundtrack for Cara’s first four years was The Wiggles’ Henry the Octopus. I listened to that song 195,073,243 times in that car. I also listened to a lot of crying in carseats and of course there was puking and quick stops to change diapers and kids arguing and me taking deep breaths to prevent myself from yanking the Wiggles CD from the CD player and throwing it out the window.

But there was also driving baby Lucy home from the hospital to our house in DC. There was me always asking Eva how Lucy was doing in the backseat and Eva checking on Lucy and, noting her big blue eyes, always answering, “She’s just peeking.”

There was my mom and me driving down to visit my college friends at the beach and finding out that Lucy had covered herself in markers on the way home.

There was driving baby Noni home from the hospital to our house in Frederick, Maryland.

There was the pipe cleaner sculpture that the girls made in the back of the car in Los Angeles. It grew every day. Whenever I dropped Lucy off at preschool, her teacher would always ask if she could look in the car to check on the pipe cleaner artwork progress.

There was the long drive from Los Angeles to Boulder. Which somehow also ended up with Lucy covered in markers yet again.

There were road trips to Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Maine, Vermont, Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon. Weekend trips to the mountains for camping and skiing. And of course hours and hours and hours of carpooling to dance and theater and riding and soccer.

When we bought Cara, we were just entering the “family with young kids” stage and it seemed like it would stretch on forever. These days, there are no more diapers or marker wars or Wiggles CDs. And Eva (now Eevee) will be driving herself in two and a half years. So I guess it makes sense that when we left Cara in the parking lot in a used car shop in Longmont, it felt a bit like saying goodbye to part of the girls’ childhood.

But as we drove off in Vana (a two-year-old Toyota Sienna whose current soundtrack is pop music, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars) with all the same people in the car, I realized that of course a car is just a car and it’s the people in it who make the memories.