My Free-Range Chicks don't lay eggs

I don't watch the news, but I do pop over to CNN and Digg every once in a while to collect all the important stuff. So, I did hear in early April about a woman (Lenore Skenazy) who let her 9-yr-old son take the subway in NYC. I don't live in NYC. I have been to visit and found it generally to be a swell place. The only disagreeable people I found there were A) the street-side Rolex salesmen, and B) this one waitress in SoHo who looked at me like I was a complete idiot when I asked her how the heck it was 2:30 in the afternoon and they were still serving brunch. Look, I'm from the South, and I'm pretty certain that we invented brunch, and even if we didn't (we didn't), I'm fairly certain that a meal whose name is a portmanteau of "breakfast" and "lunch" should probably finish up before noon. I'm just saying.

What was I saying? Oh, yes, NYC. So I can't say that I would send Lena on the subway in NY, but that has a lot to do with Lena being completely unfamiliar with the city. If she had grown up taking the subway (Tube/Underground/Metro) daily, I think (I hope) that I would probably do the same thing that this woman did: set up a very controlled opportunity for my kid to show his mettle. I have done the same sort of thing for the girls, getting them accustomed to being home alone. When Lena was 5, I left her home for about 30 minutes. She was ill and a barf-o-matic, so I taught her my cell-phone number, had her practise dialing it, wrote it all over the house, and then went to pick up her medicine. She called me every 3 minutes while I was away, just tickled that I would answer when she got to make big-girl phone calls. That thrill improved her health vastly more than the medicine I was picking up.

This woman was dubbed America's worst mother, and I have to wonder at what sort of horrible standard of child-rearing that middle-class money affords us. Kids take public transport every day. They come home to empty houses. But are their mothers bad? Do we (and I mean the helicopter parents) think that if they really loved their children, they'd find a way out of the working-class tier they're in? they'd buy them a cell-phone? escort them to their friends' houses after vetting them and all of their immediate neighbors? Do we love our children more if we lock them in a very safe cage and keep them from any hint of danger? Our children have never been safer than they are in this generation. With the exception of the risks from traffic (and we all know my fear of children + traffic), the risks and rates of abduction, assault, and abuse have decreased since I was a child. The only increase has been in the reporting of isolated incidences, giving us a false sense of constant and imminent danger. This is why I don't watch the news. The very nature of my job as a mother is to make my job redundant -- my goal is to push these little chickies out of the nest and watch them fly away.

At this moment, I have no idea where my kids are. Okay, I have some idea. I could narrow it down to a postcode (we have a fairly small area covered by our postcode). Somewhere, Lena is riding her bike, and Livia is running behind trying to smack Lena with a bamboo pole. (This is an eccentricity that cannot be explained in this post). I let my kids climb trees until the tree top bends with their weight so high up. (Livia is famous for falling out of the apple tree three times in one week. The third time, she came in the house quite scratched up after I let her in through the front door. I was curious why she had gone around to the front door since the tree is in the back. She had fallen out of the tree, over the fence, into the neighbor's garden. To get out of their yard, she had to go through their front gate. We had a short moratorium on tree climbing after that.)

But I don't say this to brag. In all actuality, I am acutely aware that I am vastly over-protective of my girls. Here we are in the beautiful English countryside, surrounded by woods, streams, fields, and dozens of footpaths that spider out from our front door, and I will not let my girls wander as I did as a child (it should be noted that my mother was accused of teaching me "Independence through neglect.") I could disappear for the whole day if it were not for chores (which I admittedly shirked whenever possible.) I caught things and killed things. I hammered nails into trees, left the hammer out in the elements, and then tasted the pine sap (note: it may look and be sticky like honey, but it is not yummy) (2nd note: if you are the daughter of a forester, do not under any circumstance ever put a nail into a live tree. To this day, the sight of a treehouse makes me wince at the thought of how now that whole stand of trees will be lost to disease (so went the lecture I received -- and no, not a single one of our trees was lost)) (3rd note to my children: don't touch my tools.) Dana and I found a sleeping bat once, brought it home, named it, and then shrieked in horror when it awoke and showed how really uncute bats are. She and I built forts, swam in the pond, fished, mummified grubs (with the leftover raspberry candies that no one would eat out of Whitman's Sampler combined with perfumed filched from my mother -- no, I can't explain the logic behind the candy in the mummification process). Every 5th of July, I dug out any leftover powder from the bottle-rockets with plans to build a bomb (at this very moment, the NSA just flagged my blog). I whittled sticks into, er, um, sharper sticks. I also managed to whittle my thumb once. Only once. I fell on some lumber (upon which I was tight-rope walking), cut my leg on a very rusty nail, and probably needed a tetanus shot and some stitches, but when I went in to tell my parents, they were engaged in an afternoon "nap," so I risked lockjaw and gangrene rather than the embarrassment of admitting that I could hear them, and patched myself up with bandaids. My point? I had a great, wild childhood of solitude and craziness. I still love walking alone in the woods, taking things apart, and starting wacky projects with Dana that we never finish. And I now get excited about snow days, frog spawn, and bird eggs; bike races, books, and boys -- all the wonder and discovery that comes from being Free Range Children (or in my case, their mother).