This morning I got stuck behind the most freaked out and by far the slowest teen driver I’ve ever seen. Of course it’s a law of nature that as I’m running late, a giant red SUV operated by a ghost-white and perspiring 15- or 16-year-old boy would have to crawl past and block me from passing him on our long, long back road en route to my office.

I aged twenty years in the next twenty minutes. As the teen driver — we’ll call  him Billy — continued at a snail’s pace, a line of cars ten deep accumulated behind me. At one point, I literally took my foot off the gas and just coasted while  going through my life goals, prioritizing them and deciding what my next “big move” should be. (So, um, thanks?)

I would have gotten really agitated — three years of commuting to college and driving D.C.’s Beltway daily will do that to a girl — but I could see that the kid was, well, about to have a nervous breakdown. And his sunglasses-wearing mother in the passenger seat just didn’t seem too worried about it.

Billy needs to learn how to drive, and trust me — totally get that. Sometimes it’s not convenient to wait for the roads to clear out before taking the newbie out on the highways. Yep, no problem — get that too. But couldn’t his mom see that her kid was gripping the steering wheel so tight, it darn near disintegrated in his sweating palms? Since I was almost in their backseat, I should have asked her to share her mug of coffee and pass me a section of the morning paper. Lady was just that chill about the whole thing.

If that were my perspiring 16-year-old, I’d have asked him to pull over and let the five thousand cars about to rear-end him go by. And then maybe the people that cut him off wouldn’t have been flipping the poor kid the bird at 8:45 a.m. on an innocent, sunny little Friday.

‘Cause, um? Traumatic. I wanted to grab a piece of paper and scrawl “IT’LL BE OKAY!” in big block letters, then hold it up to my window for baby boy to see.

Driving isn’t easy — especially in the “big city.” I learned how to operate a vehicle with my patient and good-natured father, who only occasionally shouted when I took a turn too tight. (Which was, you know, pretty much every turn.) In my old red 1990 Corolla, affectionately called “The Red Bomb,” Dad and I would cruise the streets of Maryland for hours as I tried to negotiate around SUVs and not get squashed by the locals — most of whom prefer a cruising speed of 85 mph.

I learned how to parallel park in a side lot at my old elementary school (everything comes full circle!) and never needed those skills — ever — until this past fall. Forced to park on a side street in Washington, D.C., I found myself in a cold sweat as I spied the only parking space within a many-block city radius — and I had to get it.

All those afternoons parallel-parking with traffic cones Dad set up came rushing back to me. In the eight years since I’d become a fully-licensed driver, I’d never had to call on these skills. And suddenly? It was all coming down to that one moment. Of course I was meeting a guy — and of course he was standing on the street already, watching me and this humiliating display of my parking skills.

But I got in the spot. After, you know, approximately 378,879,002 turns, but . . . I got in the spot.

Did I hold up traffic? Definitely.

Were people staring at me, including the aforementioned date? Yes.

Might I have gotten flipped the bird a time or two? Probably. But I was too scared and preoccupied to notice.

So actually, Billy? I guess it will be okay, but even functioning drivers get into horrible, horrible predicaments every now and then. I can successfully take turns, make it through traffic lights and am a pretty solid driver overall, sure, but don’t ask me to parallel park an SUV.

So cruise on, little buddy. Cruise on.