My husband and I gave up all pretenses of being hip parents when we purchased an SUV a couple of months ago. I had railed against them for years; I thought they were gas-guzzling monstrosities doing the same job any nice sedan could do—but killed the environment in the process.

I had been driving a sporty little coupe for several years that my then-seven-year-old son, Jesse, had helped me pick out. I hate car shopping, so the experience went something like this: I saw the car online, I took Jesse to our local dealership, we went for a two-mile test drive, I asked him if he thought it was cute, and I signed the papers. Hey, I didn’t say it was the right way to buy a car.

Three years later, however, he’s got some serious giraffe legs and was having a lot of trouble climbing in and out of the backseat of a two-door car (which I’m hoping will scar him badly enough that he’ll avoid back seats of cars during his teen years). We really needed a new car, but as I mentioned, I’d rather have elective surgery than go car shopping.

Like any normal human being, my husband isn’t crazy about car shopping, but I think he underestimated just how much I loathe the process. I proved it to him, however, when he suggested that we stop by a car dealership one afternoon. I found a car I liked, but the thought of trying to negotiate a price, figuring out what food group we would have to do without to pay for said car, and lining up the bank paperwork suddenly made me very tired.

All of these objections went through my mind in the three seconds it took the sales guy to ask if I wanted to take it for a test drive. I turned into a four-year-old right there in the parking lot. “No, I don’t want to take it for a test drive,” I responded. Both my husband and the salesman tried to gently probe the reason I didn’t want to test drive a car I clearly liked. “I just don’t,” was my very mature answer. It was a proud moment.

On the ride home, I told my husband that the answer to this situation was for him to go buy me a car. I never thought he’d take me up on it, but he was annoyed enough with me to do just that.

And boy did he come through. He bought a beautiful silver SUV with all kinds of room for giraffe-boy and the overwhelming amount of sports paraphernalia that we haul around three seasons of the year. So sue me, I have no convictions—I love my SUV.

I’ve never been a “car” person. They just don’t excite me. My husband is crazy about his car, which I respect but never understood. But I finally get it. And I don’t even miss the dairy group—the funds for which have been funneled into the “gasoline” group. TPW