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Free Range Kids


My parents were free rangers. Their active non-involvement in much of my childhood and that of my younger siblings would earn them scorn and visits from the CPS today. Just how little my folks were aware of my activities is most evident today when I choose to freely reminisce about my escapades within their hearing. Dad just raises an eyebrow. Not because he is surprised but to let me know that although he never had proof at the time, he suspected I wasn’t any less adventuresome or reckless than the younger ones. I was just smarter. My mother professes shock and sometimes horror, but it is quickly forgotten. After all I didn’t die, wasn’t even maimed, and the police didn’t show up at the door.

Okay, the last part isn’t entirely true. The police actually showed up at my high school and requested that the girls’ dean get me from class so they could “ask a few questions”. Fortunately the dean was a woman not easily intimidated by a uniform. School policy required that she inform my parents first and my mother kept her cool enough to refuse permission. They could come to our house and question me there if they liked. That never happened however because as luck would have it I was still underage – by two whole months – and did not possess a fake ID (my two friends who did get hauled into the dean’s office both swore to that) and so I escaped being charged with underage alcohol possession and the older brother of the our friend who sold me the beer lost his job. Oh, and the little matter of transporting alcohol across state lines was dealt with by issuing a stern warning – to my two friends. I never did see a policemen over this matter nor did I receive a school punishment as was the practice of the day at my uber-conservative Catholic high school. My father told the dean that he would be handling the discipline of his daughter thank you very much and because he is a Virgo, they nodded and let the matter drop.

I was grounded for two weeks, could only go to work and school and spent the rest of my time doing what I always did – read, write and listen to music. It’s very hard to punish a Sagittarian. Even without TV (which I wasn’t banned from) I could retreat for hours into a book or my writing. How do you ground a child from her mind?

Free ranging is the new rage in parenting. A backlash against hyper-parenting and helicopter parents, free rangers let their children play unsupervised in their own yards and neighborhoods, walk to school and stay home alone once they reach a reasonable age. Free rangers are probably products of the same type of childhood that most of my peers had. The ones where we got ourselves to ball practice after school and babysat our younger siblings when our parents went out with friends on a Friday night.

I knew I was an overprotective parent but when my five year old informed me that she didn’t need me waiting for her at the bus stop after school because it was right in front of the next door neighbor’s house, I knew that it was time to let go and step away from the kid. I was only slightly older than she is when I trooped up the hill behind our house and disappeared into the next neighborhood over every morning to catch the bus to school for first and second grade. As a second grader, I was even in charge of my younger grade one sister. As a ten year old, I babysat my siblings ages 8, 7 and 5 when my folks went out for dinner. Nothing terrible ever happened and no, it wasn’t just luck.

Parents today have been indoctrinated into the hall of horrors where parenting is concerned. Death or dismemberment lurks with every unattended moment. Trailer parks and service industry jobs are all that can result from not overseeing homework diligently. All that has been really accomplished with this nonsense has been a few generations worth of kids who haven’t the coping skills or the social skills to move out and live on their own (the average age at which a child leaves home in Canada now is 32).

Children need freedom, within acceptable limits for their ages, in which to learn to think and do for themselves. Free range parenting? It’s about time we got back to it.

Walking Out of Stride (a Hump Day Hmmph)


The first time it was brought to my attention that I am not “normed” properly was my second or third year of teaching. The middle school where I taught was on the far east side of Des Moines with all the problems that “east of Eden” implies. The principal, a stern old schooler who would eventually come to loathe me, had a small group of us meeting after school one day to discuss best practices. Best practices is the last new title given to the collection of common sense things that all good teachers do to engage, corral, coerce and lift up their kids. I don’t know what they term it now as I have been out of education for almost a year and the buzz words move at the speed of sound in my former field though the ideas never really change.

At some point in the conversation, I pointed out that much of what we were discussing were practical things that all teachers do. My principal turned to me, smiled, and said,

“No, they don’t.”

“But I do these things.”

“You are not like other teachers.”

At the time I didn’t feel complimented and perhaps I wasn’t being given one. I was puzzled. Teaching was something that just came to me like manna in the desert to the Hebrews minus the wandering aimlessly. It never occurred to me that I was different. I thought I had discovered a place to belong. Or I hoped I had.

Today I find myself in much the same place career wise. While most others see the blogosphere as inferior to writing for print, I see limitless possibilities and opportunities for writers. Self-publishing and writing for nothing but the chance to be read are not generally viewed as positives by “real writers”. I can see their point. The goal is to give up the day job at some point and one can’t do that unless one’s words are being purchased.

I would like to be purchased. Bought and taken home to be perused and thought about and discussed. It’s not that I don’t have that goal too, but the true aim of my writing is to find an impact point within the people who read my thoughts. Does this put me out of stride with other writers as my long ago self was out of stride with other teachers? For the most part, I guess it does though I have found many more like minds as a writer than I ever did as a teacher.

Being different bothered me when I was younger. Lately however I have come to celebrate my inner Pippi Longstocking. There is nothing wrong, in fact much right, about walking backward or on my hands, and though I am much more likely to walk backwards than with my legs akimbo in the air (due to the gravity thing and my lack of agility), I am happy to be happy with my stride these days.

May Long Weekend: Holiday Recap


As some of you may remember, we took off for the May Long Weekend (aka Victoria Day Weekend) for British Columbia. Part of the holiday was spent at Rob’s mom’s place in Penticton, a curiously warm place that would blow away most American’s (not the intelligent or the well-traveled mind you, just everyone else) image of the Great White North as a semi-solid frozen version of northern Minnesota. 

We began the adventure in Jasper. We stayed overnight and ate breakfast Friday morning at the Soft Rock Cafe, which is the same place we ate breakfast on the day of our wedding almost a year ago. I enjoyed revisiting that place and those memories.

Friday was mainly spent on the road. Western Canada is vast. Holidaying by road involves hours and hours of driving. Getting to B.C. means traveling over the Canadian Rockies. I have been on two of the routes now. Over the Transcanada from Calgary and the Coquihalla from Kamloops. I prefer the latter. It is twined and a smoother ride but though it appears to be a safer drive too – mountain travel can be dangerous no matter the time of year. On our way back, we saw the remains of a mudslide that took the Transcanada out of commission for much of the weekend. By the time we hit the area, it was clear and traffic was flowing both ways but Rob didn’t want to tarry (not that you are allowed – mudslides are not photo ops people) because confidence was low that the highway would remain clear for long between the heavy snow melt and the rain.

Riding through the mountains is slowly becoming less of a bum-clenching experience. Canadians don’t do shoulders on their roads as a rule and the mountain highways are no exception though the Coquihalla is a bit better. Between the tight curves and the knee-high concrete jersey barriers to keep cars from tumbling off the road should they hit ice or simply take the corners too fast, it takes a while to get over the feeling that falling is imminent. Couple that with the, um, exuberant, driving of a substantial number of drivers and it would be easy to succumb to hysterical passenger seat driving. As it is, I merely adopt my zen face and phantom brake when the need arises.

Penticton is a retirement/summer tourist town sandwiched mainly between Skaha Lake and Lake Okanagan. The latter is the home of the legendary Ogopogo, a Loch Ness monster relative that I haven’t seen on either of my trips. My mother-in-law is a very sweet and wonderful person who talks more than my five year old and laments her lack of cycling opportunities and buddies. Motorcycling that is. On a Harley. She lives in a over 55 only block of two bedroom condos that is just a few blocks from the downtown. It’s really very nice. A person could walk everywhere and given the lack of anything that approaches a real winter, I could see myself living there easily. Which is what my MIL feverently hopes with every visit we make. She spends a lot of time talking Rob’s ear off about the “wonders” of Penticton.

It’s not paradise though. I did mention it was a tourist mecca in the summer? They swarm and menace like hornets. The town fills to the overflow parking lots and everything that is truly garish, lemming-like and benignly evil flourishes. We could only live there if we lived outside the boundaries and had a Costco membership, so we could supply ourselves to outlast the tourists and not have to venture away from our cozy acerage until school starts up again in September.

There were very few tourists this weekend. May Long Weekend is still a bit early for the hardcore flip-flip and swimsuit as daily wear crowd. But the casino was hopping (yes, casino – what is up with the need to build one of those on every body of water in North America?), and the homeless were everywhere.

On my first visit to Penticton I learned that warmer Canadian climates had large populations of homeless. Penticton is part of the norm in that respect. They are everywhere and honestly, I don’t feel all that safe walking alone through the downtown early morning or evening. Perhaps I should be more charitable but most homeless are so because of mental health issues or addictions and nice as they may be, these are not little things and people have to realize that care must be taken.

Between the casino, the few clubs and the homeless, the downtown smells like urine. More so now that it is warming up. All the more reason to take off one’s footwear when entering homes. The soles of our shoes are veritable toilets. 

Katy’s first beach visit was to Skaha Lake this weekend. She throughly enjoyed it. Ventured farther out into the water than I was comfortable and chafed herself good burying herself (with Rob’s help) in the sand.

“I am not going to bury myself again, Mama.”

Rob spent much of the visit hanging things and installing things and fixing computer issues. Number one son stuff and I have promised him that the most taxing thing he has to do when we visit my parents in June is hang out with my dad (and maybe help him sort through his menagerie of tools that have taken over the front of the garage since he fell ill almost three years ago now.

After Penticton, we headed up to Three Valley Gap near Revelstoke. It’s a family type resort of the non-stressing variety. There is a ghost town on site that boasts the largest roundhouse in North America with an accompanying assortment of decomissioned train cars including the infamous “finger car”. There is also quite the cool collection of mint condition cars dating from about 1903 to 1929. Fords mostly.

Nearby there is a place called the Enchanted Forest which was the brainchild of a woman who liked to create fanciful creatures and nursery rhytm characters out of concrete and place them in the wooded area around her home. Her husband bought the acreage area where they are set today and they created this fantasy land for children to wander about in, complete with tiny houses that my daughter delighted in to no end. There is a tree house that probably reaches a good three stories up and scenes from nearly every Mother Goose story I know. The only thing about the place that both Rob and I found odd was how surreal and creepy some of the creatures looked. Do you remember H.R. Puff n Stuff? Like that.

Aside from a bit of rain and mudslide alerts, the last leg of the holiday was good. However we all have sore bums and are glad to be home. (Oh yeah, and I smell like ass so I need to post this and hit the shower now with my apologies for not having all my links in yet. I will get them in the morning.)