049 - A Parent Dies A Thousand Deaths

[captain_slinky]

I think that the reason why I and so many of my fellow parents these days are so overly protective is because we remember how many times we almost died as children when our parents just let us go anywhere and do anything willy-nilly all across the countryside.

I would NEVER let Molly do half the stupid stuff I did when I was unsupervised:

• Run across a busy highway at the blindest of blind corners just to get to a convenience store.
• Tear apart an abandoned building
• Go camping in the woods overnight with two other 8-year-olds and no one else
• Cross a swamp/marsh where I sank in up to my bellybutton when I was luckily loosed by a particularly strong surge of water from a neighbors septic system
• Jump off the roof of the garage to see if you can make an effective parachute out of a blanket (you can't, BTW)
• Making a "Fort" out of a grove of dry blackberry vines and a "torch" (gasoline and electrical tape on a broken chair leg) to burn our path through
• Jumping bikes over bonfires
• Playing frisbee with sawblades
• Going outside with a lighter and a bag of expired fireworks just to see what I could blow up
• Fireworks in general (Roman Candle Fights, Bottle Rocket Fights, "Who Can Hold The Firecracker The Longest" challenges, seeing if a Whistling Pete can get hot enough to melt a Hotwheels car, etc)
• Peeing anywhere and everywhere I Gawd Damn FELT like
• Ditch Swimming
• BB Gun Battles
• Standing up by the highway and chucking rocks at cars we thought were going too fast
• Forgetting that the rock on the beach I am sitting on is only visible at Low Tide, and not remembering that till the tide is so high that I can't find my bike any more so i have to swim back to shore and come back the next day to look for my bike

...And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head!

Comments

[aurora77]

That all sounds rather like stuff either I and/or my friends did. I'll add a couple:

* Wandering out into the fields in the back of my house at dusk so I could hear the pack of coyotes better.
* Building a fort out of old boards with rusty nails and other stuff from the abandoned, falling-down outbuildings behind our houses and being lucky enough not to get stabbed by a nail when it collapsed on us.

I'm sure I did some other stupid stuff as a kid, but I didn't have access to as many harmful things as some kids did, so it wasn't as life-threatening. I was also a bit more risk-averse than some.