I’ve arrived at my new park: Fort Zach Taylor State Park in Key West. A one-minute stroll to the beach, where the Gulf of Mexico collides with the Atlantic Ocean. Navy base with an Epcot Center looking oversized golf ball to the left, stunning sunsets to the right. The station for the bike entrance used to be a tiki hut. This park is as small and cute as it is majestic and historic, boasting and preserving a Civil War-era fortress.

And the space for the four volunteer RVs is the most challenging of any I’ve had to get into. It wasn’t easy when I had a seventeen-footer and I was ready for it to be even harder with my new thirty-footer. I tried not to think about it as I drove over bridges spanning the fifty shades of aqua that is The Florida Keys. I let my excited emotions overshadow the logistical laps my mind was doing around the pool.

Once arrived, the usual introductions from the volunteer campers already thereI asked for guidance so I didn’t hit anything. Just “driver side” or “passenger side” or “straight” was all I needed. I knew which way to steer. I already knew that the camper moves the opposite way that you turn the steering and told the men as much. But the one didn’t hear me–or didn’t believe me–and it got real complicated real quick. I get underestimated a lot. Still. After almost five years of living on the road.

Do they think I can’t have boobs and brains? Do they think not having a man driving is some kind of disability? (I could argue the opposite). You don’t need a penis to pull a camper (there’s a joke that if you do, you’re doing it wrong). And testosterone has nothing to do with parking. I’m an excellent parallel parker; the instructor I took my test with to get my driver’s license told me I could “park his car anytime.”

Yet somehow, in all the fumbling and misdirections of “Okay, now turn the wheel to the right . . . I mean the left. . . nope, too close. Pull her back out and try again,” it gets said: “Do you just want me to do it?”

And I answer the same way I always have, for almost five years. “If that would be easier for you.”

Because I know what I’ve always known; the hard, cold fact that the only way to master anything is through practice. The only way to learn, is to do. And I know something else. What my father would tell me over and over again as I grew and matured:

“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

He used to love to tell me that. And I loved to hear it. I wanted to believe it. Even though it went against every Cinderella storybook ending,

Officer and A Gentleman final scene,

co-dependent love song lyrics conditioning I’d been receiving since I was old enough to notice.

Maybe that’s why he repeated it so often. Maybe he knew what I was up against. Whatever the reason, it finally made it through a crack in the gender norms where it could smolder inside of me until it became a mantra of my subconscious.

I pushed it to the side when I hopped out of my truck and let this guy take over. I watched as he tried to back it in. It was a little like being outside of my body, watching this thing that had been attached to me for the past 723.5 miles move by someone else’s command. I started counting–a compulsive way to ground myself that I’d always used: two tries. . . five. . . nine. . . twelve. Twelve tries it took. Wow. Tight spot.

I’d barely gotten settled in and set up when, a week later, a storm started forming and heading our way. We wished and willed it away, but still it kept coming until we got the notice to evacuate. Getting out was easy. Even so, remnants of that past parking job lurked and lured me into the future, when I’d have to get her backed in there all over again. A storm within a storm.

This time, I’d decided as I wheeled back through the park gates the next day, I was going to do it. Even if it takes me twelve tries.

It took me one.