About once a year, I go over The Bridge. This is how it usually happens. A friend invites my family to a birthday party. I can’t resist a party, particularly a party on the Chesapeake Bay with a bounce house and sandcastles and kids and barbecue. For my kids, it’s one of their favorite summer traditions. For me, it’s a lovely day out until I remember about halfway there that I have to drive my kids over the Bay Bridge.

I am not a nervous driver. My first car was a ’68 Volkswagen Bug — no power steering, no AC, barely a whisper of suspension. You could really feel the road, and sometimes see it through the rotting floorboards.

These days, I’m more insulated in my modern mom-mobile. But no matter the car, I’ve never liked a bridge with curves. They’re pretty from afar, but spare me the dramatics on my drive.

As with most adventures with four children, there was a detour before we even got to the bridge. I didn’t give Dramamine to the youngest, who invariably gets carsick 42 minutes into any drive. I heard it before the older kids started narrating, giving a detailed read-out on the quantity and color of the calamity, like a press pool for puke. But, as luck would have it, our 40-minute window put us at a Macy’s in Maryland. My daughter spotted an $11 matching knit set, my son was looking like Don Draper in his L.A. era, and we were back on the road. God bless capitalism.

You know you’re it when car-seat puke isn’t even the Final Boss.

As we approached the bridge, I thought, “Maybe it won’t bother me this time.” Always the optimist, as illustrated by the lack of costume change for my toddlers on a road trip. And like that bet, this one did not pan out.

My hands got clammy and I pushed away what the Instagram therapists tell me are intrusive thoughts. I’ve done this before. It reminds me of childbirth. There is joy on the other side of this, and intellectually I know this, but when I’m faced with the hard part, I wonder if there’s another way out. The only way out is through.

Under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge

Photograph by Bernhard J Mueller-Anderson/iStock/Getty Images

Or is it? Someone came up with a genius business idea. If you do not wish to battle your inner demons every time you cross the Bay Bridge, you can call a service an hour before you arrive and someone will drive your car over it for you. For $40 cash or $50 credit, The Washingtonian reports, someone from the Kent Island Express will take the wheel and give me a sleep mask to assuage my gephyrophobia, a word for my malady that I just learned. God bless capitalism.

While I admire the hustle, this service wasn’t for me.

Instead, I did exposure therapy in front of my kids. Sometimes that’s the best way to manage a fear, and my kids are the best motivation to do so. I watched Station Eleven in 2021, an eerily timed HBO miniseries based on a book about a flu pandemic that collapses civilization. In the opening episodes, two adult brothers are unexpectedly charged with taking care of a young girl during the apocalypse. One asks the other what they should do: “We’re adults. We pretend we’re not scared.”

So I pretended very hard. I went 10-and-2, breathed evenly, and focused only on the small part of the road in front of me. Each seam we crossed — kachunk — was another small step — kachunk — to getting to the party — kachunk. My nine-year-old piped up from the back seat about halfway across, testing my fake zen by talking through her own anxieties.

“Hey, Mom, this kind of bridge makes me a little nervous!” Kachunk. “It does?” Kachunk. “Yeah, because it’s so high and you can’t see the other side.” Kachunk. “Uh-huh.” Kachunk. “And I’d sure hate to fall from up here into the water!” Kachunk. “Yep, me too, girl . . . Well, engineers do amazing things!”

Some would say I should validate her fears or avoid my own. That contrast is the crux of Bad Therapy, by Abigail Shrier, who notes that psychological studies show that “an individual is more likely to meet a challenge if she focuses on the task ahead, rather than her own emotional state.”

She may end up with the same fear I have, but she’ll see me cross that bridge every time we come to it . . . preferably not again until next summer.