Ode to a Minivan
After 15 years of driving minivans, I am passing the baton to the next generation.
2025 me with my emotional support vehicle Honda Odyssey
There I stood, age 10, standing at the back window of the station wagon. 1985, face pressed against the glass. It was a gold color befitting of a 70s-era vehicle, as I remember it. The way-back flattened to a “bed” and my sisters and I would fight over who got to lie back there on road trips. Seatbelts be damned.
My parents were selling the station wagon, and I was distraught. I even remember the license plate number — QHX418 — as I watched the station wagon drive off into someone else’s life. I remember my dad saying something like, “Come on, Julie” as we left the scene, as I turned toward our new, unfamiliar ride.
This week, 40 years later, I crawled around in my minivan cleaning it out so it would be ready to trade in. Over seven years old, it was a part of my life from age 43 to 50. The middle years (hopefully) of my life. It replaced the prior minivan that we had for the prior 7.5 years. Fifteen years of my life proudly spent in minivans.
There were Chick-fil-A straw wrappers and Burts Bees chapstick lids in nooks and crannies. Some masks in a gallon Ziplock bag from the start of the pandemic in 2020. The grocery list my daughter wrote before she went back to college: yogurt, avocados, ground turkey. A melted Reese’s Peanut Butter tree from Christmas, still in its orange and green wrapper.
In the back of the van were the Lululemon visors I wear to my kids’ sporting events — kept in the car because no other hats fit my head. Empty water bottles. Blankets and stadium seats for watching the drill team, and lacrosse and baseball games.
When I say we actually could’ve lived in our minivan the way I had it stockpiled — I’m not lying.
As I cleaned the middle row, I reached way down in the pocket behind the driver’s seat and pulled out a mini-golf scorecard from a Colorado vacation. Bright yellow, folded multiple times, pencil markings smeared. The scorecard, of all things, set my tears ridiculously aflow.
I cursed my husband, the hater-of-minivans, for encouraging the purchase of a new car, and came inside, face red and tears still flowing. I think I heard my husband chuckling as he told the kids why I was crying.
I don’t need a new car, I told him. Even though last summer the air conditioner let out the moan of a dying walrus as I turned it on in the Texas heat. At the time, my sister reached up to the vents, trying to help. “Don’t tell Darrin. He’ll make me sell the car,” I told her.
“Do you want to say good-bye to the minivan?” I asked my son through my tears. Not sobbing, true-grief tears, but the kind you have to wipe every few minutes.
Unconcerned, he just laughed. “Nah, it’s just a minivan.”
“I’m good,” responded the second teen. “It’s a car, Mom.”
But the memories in that car! The road trips to DisneyWorld and Colorado. Hauling my kids and their friends to amusement and water parks. Is there anything a minivan can’t haul? I stand proud as I sing the praises of the minivan.
The magical doors that slide open so young arms don’t fling a door open and hit the car next to it? The way you can open both sliding doors and the rear hatch as you walk across the parking lot with groceries and three kids?
In the minivans I watched my kids graduate from rear-facing car seats to front-facing boosters to seatbelts, and then from front-seat passengers to “Please Be Patient: Student Driver” bumper stickers. In them I buckled in my babies and, in the blink of an eye, gripped the seats as they each learned to drive.
In it I laughed when my 15-year-old daughter was flipped off in packed Houston traffic for taking a too-wide left turn. And there’s that dent on the front bumper when I hit the concrete pole in the Galleria parking lot because I was about to wet my pants and my daughter couldn’t quit laughing.
Swim team wet towels left in the back seat. Picking up my Beagle from the vet and having him lift a leg on that other back seat. Road-trip food and goldfish crumbs no doubt trampled into the carpet. Spilled snow cones and candy wrappers.
The realization by a first, then a second, and now a third teenager that they can connect their phones and play their teenage music as we ride. Cramming seven kids in the car to go to the beach, or the mall, or baseball games.
Pulling in from work and sitting for three minutes in the driveway, collecting myself as I transition from work to home. Sitting in the grocery store parking lot for the same. That minivan and me? We understood each other. No judgment, she protected me and my solitude. She let me finish my NPR podcast before I got out of the car.
So maybe it’s grieving the minivan, and maybe my tears are more because I don’t need one anymore. The kids are growing up, driving their own cars, chasing their own dreams. What a fun ride it’s been. Maybe it’s not as much about trading in the minivan and more about my not liking change.
So today at the car dealership, the salesman asks, “What brings you in looking for a new car today?”
“My husband never wanted to be a minivan driver,” I tell him, and he laughs. Otherwise I would be driving that car until it carries my cold, dead body to the graveyard. Adios, Honda Odyssey. I will remember you forever — KHT9958. Thank you for your service.
2010 me with my emotional support vehicle Toyota Sienna
The advice and opinions herein are by no means meant to be a substitute for professional medical advice. Please contact your personal physician, mental health provider or health care professional for medical advice. Opinions are my own.