Gus has been bugging me to blog this since it began Saturday, but I like to know how a story ends first before blurting it out…

Turns out that if you want to close on a home improvement loan you need to show your ID, you know, so terrorists don’t get funds to buy a furnace. And furthermore, they check to see if that ID is, in fact, current. Turns out mine was not.

Was NOT! It didn’t expire on my 30th birthday as I thought – it expired LAST JULY – on my 29th birthday! This spiraled my Saturday into chaos as I hurried to the closest BMV only to be told that since I had exceeded the 180 day grace period that my license was TOTALLY INVALID and that I would need to present my birth certificate or valid passport (mine expired in October) and my social security card in order to get my TEMPORARY LICENSE PERMIT. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, I – at 29 years of age and 9 months pregnant – had to get my TEMPS! MY TEMPS! Then I needed to take the written exam and if I passed then I could take the DRIVING TEST! Stunned, I left the office as everyone in line turned around to stare at who was getting this horrendous news.

I had called Gus to bring me the check book (what establishment doesn’t take credit cards these days!) so I climbed into his car, told him the whole story and proceeded to bawl my eyes out. He had told/scolded me it was a big thing on the way home from the bank in his most lawyerly voice. Turns out he was right, as usual.

I was pretty sure I had my social security card, but my birth certificate I hadn’t seen since I applied for my passport so who knew where that was. After a horrible morning of tearing apart our files and every other place a memento could have been stored, I finally got a hold of my mom who quickly found both pieces.

Good thing. Because if you don’t have those pieces and the other pieces of ID you may have are expired, you’re screwed. The rules of what documents the SSA and the BMV will accept are totally inconsistent and are without clear logic once you get past your birth certificate and your official, original, authentic, signed when you were 9, social security card.

The bad thing about your mom having your documents is that you 1. have to call her and tell her what stupid thing you’ve done and 2. she’s married to your boss, who’s already had it with your pregnant inaptitude, and who is repsonsible for your company car. I will never live this down.

So I went yesterday to get my temps, seen above, and to the testing center across town to take my test. Yeah, it’s not really a written test, it’s all done on a touch screen. It politely tells you the correct answer when you miss one, which is nice. I missed four of forty. Not too bad, there are after all some pretty arcane driving laws. But now I know that taxis must stop at all railroad crossings. Who knew?

Then this morning I went and picked up my poor Grandmother so I could arrive at the BMV for my driving test with a licensed driver (and with a sick Carl in tow) and the very kind woman who promised to work me in this morning took me out to my car. Okay, start the car, left turn signal, right turn signal, now honk the horn – oh my God, it’s a total flashback – then over to THE CONES!!!

I’m not a bad parallel parker. But those stupid cones and their treacherous little white poles. I passed, by like an inch. She was even nervous, she just kept saying, “Just don’t hit anything, just don’t hit anything.” I told her not to worry but it was CLOSE.

Relieved, we started out on the driving test. I made one wide left turn because I couldn’t remember if I was supposed to go to the closest left lane or the far right, but I’ll take that 5 pts. because I hate it when people waiver in their driving decisions. But I didn’t speed (among the reasons I failed my very first drivers test at 16) and she gave me a generously short test and stamped my paperwork.

I took Grandma home – legally – and went back over to my neighborhood license bureau with Carl to get my REAL license. The picture on my temps was better, but I’ve not been so proud to hold that little card since I turned 21.

So the moral of this story is, know your expiration dates and the location of all your documents, because all of us American patriots who have never had to worry about “having our papers in order” are in for an ever greater shock as we make these documents more complicated to get/keep and more intertwined into our every-day lives than ever before.

Story sub-moral, if something like this is to happen to you, hope that you’re scary pregnant so that everyone is sympathetic and helps you do things really quickly so you don’t go into labor on their watch.