A woman who can have breakfast with her mother and dinner with her children is lucky indeed. But for me to pull this off required a 525-mile drive.

It’s not as odd as it seems to spend Mother’s Day driving. In fact, I’ve done much of my mothering from behind the wheel. I’ve soothed tempers, given pep talks, supervised fights, hammered out college choices and discussed everything from God to boys to algebra (though not necessarily in that order).

Like talking and walking, talking and driving offers great freedom of conversation. You are both looking forward, not at each other (at least for the child riding shotgun), and that frees people to say what’s really on their minds.

I was recalling some of those conversations yesterday — not just the ones where I was the mother, but the ones where I was the daughter, too. My mother and I have solved most of the world’s problems on long drives. And in the recollection of all those words flying lies great peace and strength.

So on Mother’s Day I celebrated not just the bonds between generations, the mother I have and the mother I hope I am, but I also honored that unsung vehicle of mothering, the vehicle itself.