It is the most common form of identification, accepted everywhere and other than our phones, the item we are sure to always have with us. It proves to the world that we are who we say we are and represents freedom and independence as it serves as the legal document that permits us to get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle.
The driver’s license.
I have had 7 in my lifetime over a span of 36 years; the last one I received 6 months after my vision loss. There is no testing in Pennsylvania when you renew your driver’s license and I was able to go get my photo taken without anyone knowing I couldn’t see. The doctors hadn’t taken away my driving privileges and there was still a chance back then that my sight would return on its own. The last thing I wanted was to find myself vsually abled but legally disabled.
At a post-op appointment on Wednesday, the receptionist pointed out that my license had expired in 2017. I was shocked. I had not received any notification that it was time to renew it and I am sure the reason is that the connection was made through Social Security that I am legally blind. In other words, they caught me. I assure you I had no intention of driving. But I did not want to lose my license. I grew up in a ticking time bomb home, my alcoholic father a nasty drunk who was verbally abusive and prone to slamming and banging to pepper the name calling and cursing. My mom, a city girl all her life until she and my father moved to the suburbs when she was 26, never learned to drive. My first driver’s license was not only my but her new lease on life. It was a survival tool in those days but driving quickly became one of the great loves and joys of my life for a myriad of reasons. It is a means to an end, of course, it allows you to go where you need to be, but I loved the journey as much as the destination.
I went yesterday for a state photo ID. In the same DMV location where I took my learner’s permit test and received my license in 1981, I surrendered the right to drive. It was a deeply difficult residual effect five years after the fact of waking up blind . . . and the hurt I felt inside was not diminished by the passage of time. I could not help but wonder, Will the ripples of that tsunami ever stop? Just when I swim to dry shore, another wave tosses me about, forcing me to once again find my bearings, adjust the plan and start again.
I walked out of the DMV and got into the passenger seat, not the driver’s, without a license but a photo ID. My 16-year-old self could have never imagined the turn her life would take when she left this same parking lot, the key to her life not in the ignition, but in the windowed slot in her wallet.
Ironically, that turn did not require a driver’s license.
