For the past month or so, I've been running a one-man driving school on the side. We have twin sixteen-year-old daughters, and both of them have their learner's permits. Each of them needs to have a certain amount of time behind the wheel, with some of it being at night, and some during bad weather. That means almost everywhere we go, one of them is in the driver's seat. And I'm right there beside them, riding shotgun, saying reassuring things like, "This is an intersection, sweetheart. You can't stop in the middle," or "It's okay, it made a lot of noise, but it was just a curb. I need new tires anyway!" Every once in a while, I spin around, make an angry face, and launch an obscene gesture to the adult behind us who's tailgating and impatiently honking his horn.

If I'm making it seem as if I do all the driving instruction in our family and my wife doesn't do any of it, that's because it's true. And that, in turn, is because my wife is, as my daughters put it, "a screamer."

To clarify, my wife doesn't scream when she's mad or upset. She screams when she's scared. Often, it happens when she sees a bug, or when we watch a horror movie. When it's a bug, I usually just ease out of my chair and get a magazine. When it's a scary movie, she'll turn away from the screen, bury her head in the couch, and repeat in a loud voice, "Tell me when it's over! Tell me when it's over!" I'll give play-by-play in a calm voice, saying, "Okay, Jason just stabbed him with a knife...now he's dragging the body..." until the scary part has ended.

My wife tried just once to take the girls driving, but when they came back up the driveway, my wife looked like she'd just escaped from a hostage situation, and the girls stomped back into the house without a word, eyes ablaze. When I asked the girls later for an explanation, one said, "It was like Mom was on a rollercoaster! I might have lost some hearing in my right ear!"

Most often, I'll take the girls out alone, but having to do all the driving instruction for two girls is hard on me. The first week, one of them turned to me as she was cruising down a residential street and asked, quite casually, "Hey, wait a minute...which pedal is the brake?" I spend the entire ride braced in my seat, one hand on the dashboard, the other wrapped tightly around the overhead hand grip. I try to keep my eyes on the road, but I keep glancing down to the dash, wondering how many airbags our car has, whether they still work, and whether the talcum powder cloud is going to taste funny when it explodes.

To be fair to my daughters, they're coming along pretty well and are driving as well as you could expect from teenagers. They're pretty good about the fact that Dad sits on his side of the car, constantly wincing and bracing for an impact that never comes. When my wife has to come along, she sits in the back. She'll lean up between the seats, though, occasionally yelling things like "Watch out!", "Oh my God, slow DOWN!" or the simple but evocative "AAAAAAAHHHHH!"

We've worked things out, though. The girls are getting better every time they drive, and these days I do deep breathing exercises in the shotgun seat, telling myself that I've never actually heard of a kid with a learner's permit wiping out their parents. And to handle the stress, my wife hunches down in the back seat, eyes glued to her phone, checking email or Facebook, pretending, like a kid in a scary movie, that it's just not happening. The other day I tried to point out a new store in our neighborhood as we drove by, but my wife didn't answer. I looked back to see her glued to her phone, refusing to look up.

"That's okay," she said. "I don't need to see anything. Just tell me when it's over!"

We probably make an odd sight: Dad in the shotgun seat, looking like someone just threw a snake in his lap, Mom in the back seat, hunched over her phone, desperately trying to keep reality at bay, a teenage girl behind the wheel, and a teenage girl at the wheel, desperately wishing she had other parents.

If you see us, you can laugh all you want. Just don't honk your horn. It's not pretty when I turn around.

To find out more about Peter McKay, please visit www.creators.com.