> In about a month, I hopefully will be taking my road test. I went out to practice today and realized that I couldn't parallel park to save my life. I was ok at it before, but now, I just can seem to do it. But I guess that it doesn't help when my mom is telling me how to do it as I'm doing it and it doesn't work.

It seems to me that most of the battle with parallel parking comes down to knowing your car. If you aren't completely familiar with the length and width of your car, and how sharply you can turn it, parallel parking just doesn't work.

It might help to try a different way of looking behind you. If you use your wing mirrors normally, try sitting up and turning right around in your seat so you can look out the back and side windows instead. Both my cars have been smallish hatchbacks and rear visibility is excellent this way -- far easier than using the mirrors for reversing or parallel parking.

At the risk of sounding obvious, you *do* reverse into a parallel park, right? It's much harder to drive forward into one, but I still see people trying it.

The key is figuring out exactly how far forward you need to be, and then how sharply you need to turn to angle the car in. Get somebody to park another car, or place a marker where the rear of a car would be, and then practise backing in behind that. In my car, for example, I know I need to start backing in from a position where my car's rear tyre is parallel with the back end of the car in front.