Handing over the car keys

Also: Jon Stewart’s "calm-down" paternalism isn’t funny in 2024 [Donate ❤️]( [View in Browser](  February 25, 2024 Dear Cog reader, There is no faith greater than handing your teenager the car keys, strapping yourself into the passenger seat and letting your child drive down the street. You will swallow the voice inside shouting, “Don’t hit that tree!” You will struggle to keep your voice calm as you suggest that your child look – look! – both ways before turning onto another street. Linda K. Wertheimer captured this parental ritual of ceding control in an [essay this week]( about her son’s latest milestone: turning 16 and getting his learner’s permit. “My son was going to become a driver,” she writes. “I was thrilled. I was terrified.” Linda’s fear transcended the normal parental anxiety about teaching her son to drive. In her family, driving was laced with trauma. Linda’s older brother Kevin, her best friend, died in a car accident when he was 23. State troopers said Kevin apparently fell asleep at the wheel on a winding road in rural Utah. His red Jeep rolled down a cliff. This coming Friday will be the 38th anniversary of his death, a date she marks each year, along with his birthday. “My biggest fear after losing Kevin was losing anyone else I loved,” she writes. Linda’s essay examines the way we all bring our previous lives — the joy and the trauma — into parenting. She recognized that her family’s grief could alter the way she parented her son, whose middle name is Kevin, for the uncle he never met. “From that very first moment I held Simon in my arms, I was determined not to pass on that scar to him,” she writes. I’ve known Linda for two decades, since we worked together at The Boston Globe. I’ve long admired how she writes about the sorrows that many people keep hidden – [grief]( [postpartum depression]( [family illness]( – and reminds us that they’re forever paired with love. I remember her excitement when she told me in the fluorescent hallways of the old Globe building that she was pregnant with Simon, her only child, at 42. Sixteen years later, she’s learning to let him go. Until next week, Kathleen Burge Editor, Cognoscenti [Follow](  Must Reads [Jon Stewart’s ‘calm-down’ paternalism isn’t funny in 2024]( Jon Stewart remains devoted to a lazy brand of false equivalency in which all political candidates are suspect, writes Steve Almond. But the political fate of this country isn’t a joke. [Read more.]( [Jon Stewart’s ‘calm-down’ paternalism isn’t funny in 2024]( Jon Stewart remains devoted to a lazy brand of false equivalency in which all political candidates are suspect, writes Steve Almond. But the political fate of this country isn’t a joke. [Read more.]( [Why our family still makes time for church on Sundays]( We are drifting away from one another, writes Amy Julia Becker. 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