A car is a woman's shed

THE scene: the local pool with a bunch of school mums, my four-year-old gently strumming her fingers through my hair.

THE scene: the local pool with a bunch of school mums, my four-year-old gently strumming her fingers through my hair.

I'm yakking on about how I sometimes get so tired after school runs or grocery shops that I just sit in the car outside the house afterwards, immobile, for five or 10 minutes, in the lovely cosy silence that doesn't talk back at me; in one huge and restoring exhalation of stillness. These "car moments" are just as therapeutic as a bloke's shed, and we women agree we all need them in our lives. We sink into companionable silence contemplating that heavenly little pocket of peace in the great cram of our days; mine made lovely by the fingers sifting through my hair like a tiny, tender rake.

As if on cue, the fingers' owner pipes up: "I think you've got nits, mummy." Oh for the soothing balm of a private car moment that instant! Alas, no escape. Everyone is laughing, and looking slightly aghast, and inching away as once again it is confirmed to me: I am the woman who makes other mothers feel good about themselves. And who craves at that very moment the privacy and peace, restoration and escape of her shed on wheels.

The wonders of a car for a woman! Not just when stationary post-supermarket but on the road, of course, as well. How I love those times when I can revel in my playlist without anyone groaning, sing very loudly, chuckle with the lovely gentleman on the radio and generally let the mind run amok with a richness of thinking that's hard to get within the great roar of home life; oh yes, there I am in my car, as happy as a goat in a garden.

Occasionally the dear and perceptive chap, in an effort to preserve the sanity of his marriage, senses that something is at breaking point. "Just go," he commands.

No encouragement is needed. I skedaddle. Favourite moments? Gunning alone along country roads, windows down, music up, elbow resting on the door, sun and wind-whipped; my hand reaching up to butt the breeze. The writer in me uncurling - no distraction, no depletion, no rubbing out. "Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia," the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard declared. "Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated." Oh yes. As a woman, it's the one empowering place you're in control. Motherhood is about the loss of control, a loosening, letting go; and that can be swamping.

Then there's Saudi Arabia, where women can be arrested if they get behind the wheel. Repeated campaigns have tried to get the religious edict overturned; Amnesty International says the authorities "must stop treating women as second-class citizens" because the ban is "an immense barrier to their freedom of movement". It reminds me of a line by the male protagonist, Newland Archer, in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. "'Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences."

Postscript: The car moment following the swimming pool incident? Contemplating the grim fact that, as the mother of four including a baby, nits will feature in my life for the next, oh, 15 years. Right. Can I just say I used the nit comb vigorously that night, as I do after every hair wash. Clear.

I had a little word to my daughter. She looked at me sceptically. I was heading off on an extremely rare night out after the latest birth. Her father said, to break the impasse, "Doesn't mummy look beautiful?" "Not yet," she replied in that brutally honest way of a four-year-old. We have a long way to go.

But one thing I do know is that I'll never stop her driving. Because, as her parent, I'll always want her soul to sing.