Edel Coffey: Selling my Qashqai and saying goodbye to the baby era of motherhood
For the last eight years, I have driven a faithful seven-seater Nissan Qashqai. Also known as a mammy wagon. Also known as the uncoolest car in its class.
I’ve always been a car person. I love cars and am living under the happy delusion that one day I will drive my dream car, a classic Porsche Targa in metallic blue.
But for the last eight years, I have driven a faithful seven-seater Nissan Qashqai. Also known as a mammy wagon. Also known as the uncoolest car in its class. But the seven-seater is a functional and reliable car.
There’s a reason mammies buy them.
The Qashqai has served me well for these past years but it’s an old car now and as a family of six we were starting to outgrow it. I had planned on trading it in for something newer come January, but last weekend as I sat into the car to start the Saturday merry-go-round of activity drops and collections, the red engine light came on. Red, the universal language for stop.
I googled it anyway just in case. As I suspected: Orange engine light, okay. Red engine light, very bad. When the boot handle came off in my son’s hand at the supermarket later that day, I felt like the universe was trying to tell me something. The confluence of warning signs, literal and metaphorical, told me the time to upgrade the car was not January, it was now.
I was okay with that. I kind of low-grade hated the Qashqai anyway. Or at least I thought I did.
I had reluctantly bought it after my first daughter was born when my single-lady sporty car struggled to contain the child seats and buggies and baby paraphernalia required for modern babyhood. So, I traded it in for the roomy seven seater.
I remember going to visit a friend in Dublin. She laughed when she saw the car and called me a middle-class suburban soccer mom. Which is what I was I suppose. I just hadn’t come to terms with it yet.
Despite its uncoolness, the Qashqai grew on me. It was safe, reliable, and efficient. I could go home for weekends to visit my family and everything I needed for the babies — the travel cots, the high chairs, the double buggy, and all of the other essentials — could comfortably come too.
The car had seen me through a lot. And it had seen a lot. There were lots of happy times. We could all travel together on holidays and family outings in this car and I also wrote large tranches of my debut novel in that Qashqai, mostly while waiting to collect children from various sports classes or extracurricular activities.
There were stressful times too though, travelling up and down to Dublin with two babies, always in a hurry, always hoping they would stay asleep until the next garage or lay-by where I could stop and feed them.
The Qashqai had even been pulled over by a guard once when we had found ourselves funnelled into the bus lane on College Green. I’m for it now, I thought, but when the guard looked inside the car and saw my baby and the boot-full of baby travel equipment he told me instead about his own nine-month-old baby who wasn’t sleeping and he waved us on with a ‘good luck and a safe driving now.’
There were poignant times. On the morning of my wedding, in my full-length white wedding dress and veil, I drove the Qashqai to the nursing home where my mother spent the last months of her life so we could see her on my wedding day.
A little over a year later, during the first covid lockdown, I drove to Dublin in the Qashqai again for her restricted funeral.
All of these memories came back to me as I struck a deal with a local car dealer to trade in the Qashqai.
Much as in selling my little sporty car eight years ago I had said goodbye to my single independent stage of life, in selling the Qashqai I realised I was saying goodbye to the baby era of motherhood. I hadn’t realised it would be this painful. As a mother of young children I had practically lived in that car and now it is gone, along with that period of my life.
I have a slightly more sophisticated seven-seater now, this one is black, a little sleeker, a little better suited to a woman who is past the food-mashed-into-the-seats stage of life.
While I’m happy to move on, it also feels bittersweet. I know in another eight or ten years, my eldest two children might be in college somewhere, maybe even driving cars of their own and I’ll be downsizing to something smaller (a Porsche Targa perhaps?) and letting go of the mammy-wagon stage of life.
I wonder what
memories I’ll be saying goodbye to then, what things this new car will witness, what moments we’ll share together… before we move on to the next stage.
