I grew up in Bisbee, Arizona, in the Fifties. \u00a0In the summer, we kids left the house after breakfast, mostly barefoot, and played outside until it was time to come in for lunch. \u00a0We stomped berries from the mulberry tree, we climbed trees, we ate fruit from the trees we climbed, we caught and killed caterpillars. \u00a0And we played in the wagon\u2014a non standard Radio Flyer to which our father had affixed an upgraded handle.<\/p>\n
We lived on Yuma Trail. \u00a0I\u2019m not exactly sure of the exact distance from the top of Necker\u2019s Knob, down Yuma Trail, across Arizona Street, and as far as we could coast up Cole Avenue. \u00a0From my comfy chair in our family room in Bellevue, WA, I\u2019m estimating the distance to be somewhere in the neighborhood of three quarters of a mile. \u00a0We\u2019d stack four kids in the wagon\u2014bare knees and bare feet included\u2014and fly down the steep grade of the gravel street without a helmet in sight or a care in the world. \u00a0And when we got to the bottom, we\u2019d all pile out of the wagon and do it again. \u00a0I can assure you that our mothers weren\u2019t outside watching our every move or wringing their hands. \u00a0They were too busy working inside. \u00a0(My mother canned quarts and quarts of apricots and peaches from our yard every summer.)<\/p>\n
This week I heard from a fan writing to me expressing her serious concerns about the shortcomings in Joanna Brady\u2019s parenting skills as demonstrated by scenes from Field of Bones<\/em>. \u00a0She objected to the idea that a five year old was left in a bathtub by himself for an extended period of time. \u00a0She was concerned that Joanna went outside to do chores, leaving baby Sage under the watchful eye of nothing but a baby monitor. \u00a0And 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.<\/p>\n The words \u201cDifferent strokes for different folks\u201d were the first ones that came to mind. \u00a0Because it turns out I came by my free range parenting skills quite honestly from my mother.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0We were living on a farm near Twin Brooks. \u00a0When the blizzard hit, my father and his brother were taking a load of hogs to market. \u00a0They got as far as Summit. \u00a0When they couldn\u2019t go any farther, they broke into a local lumberyard so they could keep the hogs from freezing to death overnight. \u00a0My two older sisters were at school in a one room schoolhouse a mile or so away. \u00a0There the teacher, Wanda Tharp, fired up the wood stove to keep everybody warm and then baked potatoes for the kids to eat. \u00a0That left my mother at home with me and with seventeen cows that had to be milked morning and night.<\/p>\n The house had no electricity and was lit by kerosene lamps. \u00a0When 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. \u00a0And did she take me along? \u00a0No, she did not. \u00a0She left me there in the crib, without a baby monitor in sight. \u00a0She told me often enough that when she came back inside, I was screaming bloody murder, but she had done what she had to do.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0When 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. \u00a0Admittedly that was back in the early eighties. \u00a0I\u2019m pretty sure that would not be recommended in this day and age.<\/p>\n So times change. \u00a0My 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. \u00a0Now infants have to ride in infant carriers belted into back seats and far away from the comforting touch of their mothers\u2019 hands. \u00a0The 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?<\/p>\n I will be the first to admit that I was not a perfect mother. \u00a0I am STILL not a perfect mother, and those imperfections are like that something which will not be named that always travels downhill. \u00a0They leach into the actions and reactions of my characters, often without my even noticing that it\u2019s happened.<\/p>\n I\u2019m glad my readers notice these things and care enough to send their reactions, but remember people, these are fictional characters, and I\u2019m only human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I grew up in Bisbee, Arizona, in the Fifties. \u00a0In the summer, we kids left the house after breakfast, mostly barefoot, and played outside until it was time to come in for lunch. \u00a0We stomped berries from the mulberry tree, we climbed trees, we ate fruit from the trees we climbed, we caught and killed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33,5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-family","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s3nsBA-1706","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1706"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1709,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1706\/revisions\/1709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}