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Baton Rouge traffic is threatening to make my daughter into an impatient and frustrated driver, and she’s not even in kindergarten yet.

For the past couple of years she and I have commuted downtown five days a week, a drive that takes about 15 minutes on Sunday morning, but more than a half hour any other time.

We make the most of our time, chatting about our day, listening to music or trying to make each other laugh. But amid the music and sweet banter, something ugly has crept into our commute.

A monster, in fact.

And the monster is me. I’ve systematically laid the groundwork for her to grow up to become a bad driver.

She’s already an impatient passenger.

“The light is green!” she blurted recently. “Why aren’t we moving?! These people don’t know how to drive!”

Four years old, incapable of pushing a shopping cart five feet without taking out six innocent bystanders, yet she already regards fellow motorists with contempt.

It just seems so wrong for someone so young to feel so strongly about traffic. Why, I asked her. Why would you say that?

“You say that all the time, Daddy. You say ‘Aw man, these people don’t know how to drive!’”

Oh, the humanity.

All the while I thought I was this considerate driver and efficient dad, seizing upon every teachable moment on the road of life. Turns out I’m just another shmo systematically cultivating the next type-A personality driver.

I’m as flawed as the next dad, but I do make an honest effort to spare my children my own obsessions, fears and hang-ups, and to provide a healthy buffer between my child and my neuroses.

Or as I call them, the two Ws—weather and wasps. Both have been known to send me scurrying indoors in irrational panic.

As profound and irrational as those fears can be (I’m stunned when lightning doesn’t strike me, and I truly believe wasps are the outlaw bikers of the insect world), I have managed to tame them around my children. Lightning may strike 50 yards away, but my child will never know how close Daddy came to incontinence.

But what good is my inconsistent parenting? Sure, my child one day will be able to drive calmly through a lightning storm while a wasp buzzes in the back windshield, but if the car in front of her slows down she may just come unglued.

This prompted me to reinvent myself as a commuter.

Now I measure my words behind the wheel, I consider their impact. And I try and offer soothing explanations for why our short drives take so long.

Still, there’s only so much a guy can do to hide the truth.

On an especially tedious drive to a birthday party one recent Saturday morning, she looked up from a book she’d been reading, glanced around at the motionless cars on the vast expanse of concrete all around us and, in all seriousness, asked, “Daddy, are we in Houston?”