I grew up in Bisbee, Arizona, in the Fifties.  In the summer, we kids left the house after breakfast, mostly barefoot, and played outside until it was time to come in for lunch.  We stomped berries from the mulberry tree, we climbed trees, we ate fruit from the trees we climbed, we caught and killed caterpillars.  And we played in the wagon—a non standard Radio Flyer to which our father had affixed an upgraded handle.

We lived on Yuma Trail.  I’m not exactly sure of the exact distance from the top of Necker’s Knob, down Yuma Trail, across Arizona Street, and as far as we could coast up Cole Avenue.  From my comfy chair in our family room in Bellevue, WA, I’m estimating the distance to be somewhere in the neighborhood of three quarters of a mile.  We’d stack four kids in the wagon—bare knees and bare feet included—and fly down the steep grade of the gravel street without a helmet in sight or a care in the world.  And when we got to the bottom, we’d all pile out of the wagon and do it again.  I can assure you that our mothers weren’t outside watching our every move or wringing their hands.  They were too busy working inside.  (My mother canned quarts and quarts of apricots and peaches from our yard every summer.)

This week I heard from a fan writing to me expressing her serious concerns about the shortcomings in Joanna Brady’s parenting skills as demonstrated by scenes from Field of Bones.  She objected to the idea that a five year old was left in a bathtub by himself for an extended period of time.  She was concerned that Joanna went outside to do chores, leaving baby Sage under the watchful eye of nothing but a baby monitor.  And finally she thought is was reprehensible that Joanna went into a house to have a middle of the night conversation with Marliss Shackleford while leaving Sage asleep in her car seat in a locked vehicle in a quiet residential neighborhood.

The words “Different strokes for different folks” were the first ones that came to mind.  Because it turns out I came by my free range parenting skills quite honestly from my mother.

I have no remembrance of this particular occurrence because I was still a baby when a blizzard of massive proportions came through northeastern South Dakota.  We were living on a farm near Twin Brooks.  When the blizzard hit, my father and his brother were taking a load of hogs to market.  They got as far as Summit.  When they couldn’t go any farther, they broke into a local lumberyard so they could keep the hogs from freezing to death overnight.  My two older sisters were at school in a one room schoolhouse a mile or so away.  There the teacher, Wanda Tharp, fired up the wood stove to keep everybody warm and then baked potatoes for the kids to eat.  That left my mother at home with me and with seventeen cows that had to be milked morning and night.

The house had no electricity and was lit by kerosene lamps.  When it came time to do the milking, the snow was so thick that she had to use the clothes line to help guide her to and from the barn.  And did she take me along?  No, she did not.  She left me there in the crib, without a baby monitor in sight.  She told me often enough that when she came back inside, I was screaming bloody murder, but she had done what she had to do.

When I was raising my kids as a single working parent in Seattle, the kids rode the bus (Free Bus Zone) back and forth from the summer program at the YMCA to our condo in the Denny Regrade.  When their grandmother came to visit, she was astonished that my daughter at age eight was able to guide her all around downtown Seattle without missing a trick.  Admittedly that was back in the early eighties.  I’m pretty sure that would not be recommended in this day and age.

So times change.  My mother rode in cars with no seat belts and with a baby on her lap for thousands of miles in which no one came to grief.  Now infants have to ride in infant carriers belted into back seats and far away from the comforting touch of their mothers’ hands.  The babies are probably safer (The federal safety people have declared it to be true, so that must be the case, right?) But how many mothers have been driven to distraction and tears because their disconsolate infants are screeching at them from the back seat?

I will be the first to admit that I was not a perfect mother.  I am STILL not a perfect mother, and those imperfections are like that something which will not be named that always travels downhill.  They leach into the actions and reactions of my characters, often without my even noticing that it’s happened.

I’m glad my readers notice these things and care enough to send their reactions, but remember people, these are fictional characters, and I’m only human.