My mom didn't have the confidence to learn how to drive until I was 16 & was ready to get my own license. She was about 43 then. She had underdeveloped eyes from birth & even though thick glasses gave her the ability to see, she didn't believe she was capable of seeing well enough to drive. Definitely understandable but not for me as a kid when every other mom was capable of driving & I was left out of many things I wanted to do because of her inability. Kids don't always look at how understandable something is they just see how badly it affects them.

It was probably how that limited my life growing up in So. Calif. made me so determined to drive & get my license on my 16th birthday. Public transportation in the area I lived in was a huge walk to get to in the first place & as a kid, taking the bus wasn't even very safe in that area. My mom stayed home or depended on my dad to drive her everywhere when he was not at work. It limited what I could be involved in as a child because she socially knew no one so there was no one to get a ride with. Neighbors drove us to school because we were too far to walk but too close for a school bus. I remember being determined to be in high school marching band but I had to walk in my uniform almost 2 miles in order to get to the persons house whose mother was able to drive her daughter (who was in drill team) & me to the school. Practice was during school so I didn't have to arrange anything different....my dad usually picked me up right before leaving for work in the late afternoon.

I sensed how dysfunctional my parents were which is probably why I was always in conflict with them growing up but it was my NORMAL.

Driving was one thing I was not going to miss out on as it meant FREEDOM to me & I forced the issue from the time I was 13. No drivers permit at that age or driving on city streets but my parents always wanted me to go with them on their boring drives out to the desert on Sunday afternoons...(my dad had this dream of walking around the desert & stumbling onto a gold mine .... anyway....). I had no interest in going if he wasn't willing to start teaching me to drive out in the middle of the nothingness desert roads where there were no other cars around. He had grown up on a Nebraska farm & had driven tractors & farm vehicles since he was a kid so the concept was ok with him....so bribery got me learning to drive young.

Taking driver training with the rest of my class in high school was more of a challenge because I was younger than everyone else by almost a year so I wasn't old enough to get my permit when the rest were learning to drive. When I did take it I actually failed the simulator part because I was so used to driving a real car the simulator was like watching a movie & I watched instead of driving to the video. I smashed into bicycles, ran stop lights, backed into cars.....I just didn't get the hang of driving something that wasn't real & actually surrounding me. (lousy at video games before they even existed in 1969).

My 16th birthday I was at the DMV first thing in the morning with my parents car (this was the only birthday present I DEMANDED)....got my license on the first try but I still remember even knowing how to drive how scary it was to drive on the crowded freeway ALONE for the very first time....but the feeling of FREEDOM for the first time in my life was amazing.

I can understand your feeling about your parents & life skills....my parents couldn't teach something they didn't have themselves in their case. I didn't realize just how lacking they were until looking back only a few years ago, long after they have died. Being an only child I had no one else to talk to about how lacking they were growing up.....but it was definitely an awakening when I did realize what I had lived with all those years.

You are right....all we can do is learn what we lacked learning growing up. I think the 2 years of intense DBT & learning skills there was what magnified what my own parents had lacked the ability to do or to teach. I learned best what I didn't want to be like from my parents but not having any mentors that showed me what I wanted to be like, I figured it out the best I could on my own though I definitely taught myself my own dysfunctional along the way.....undoing that in my late 50's has been challenging but really awesome.

You will get there....time & patience with yourself.

I