Preventing Grace
Been thinking about the Free Range Kid debate percolating all over the Internet and the country. Probably unwise of me to weigh in or have an opinion of any kind but well, what is a blog for if not foolishness.
Matt dug out bins and bins of pictures from our closet last week, which is his preferred manner of recreating. Throwback Thursday is his favorite thing ever. He loves loves loves old pictures and thinking happily and fondly about the past. I’m sort of ambivalent. I mean, I had an extraordinary growing up and a very pleasant young adulthood, and now live comfortably in the long declining shadow of a once great power. The wrecks and ruins of former glory crumble gently around me, sometimes with real ugliness. It’s hard to look back on the beauty of my traveling youth and not feel a tinge of envy for the past. Not that it was all golden roses. I had to leave home for boarding school and I was constantly saying goodbye to people I really love. Wherever I am I have always been the stranger. So, I won’t lie, looking at pictures of myself in Africa dredges up great buckets of sorrow, hauled as they are, from the well of every grief mingled together. But Also, and here’s where the free range bit comes in, I got to play outside and take a huge number of risks. There’s a nice picture of me paddling along the rocks of a swollen stream while my father tests the rushing current carefully with his bare feet to see whether we should go over it in our car. Which of course we did, because what are you going to do, stop here all day? Life is risky. That’s just how it is.
But
Thread Number Two
I am a fearful person. I live in mortal dread of getting in trouble. I hate it. I would rather crawl into any scorpion infested hole than get in trouble with anyone, most of all the state. I anxiously follow the law, as best I can, hoping that no one will come yell at me. This probably rises up out of always being the stranger and always trying to decode and understand the cultural regulations that everyone obviously knows but me. That is magnified for me as someone who looks like I am from here, and yet blunders often, because I missed a lot of information along the way. It’s so weird to me that Matt isn’t anxious about the law. Even when he doesn’t exactly know what it is. And he doesn’t view the police with anxiety and fear. Maybe this has something to do with the relative self control of police in this country. They won’t level an AK47 at the window of your car here, and are older than 12 years old.
Thread Number Three
I have six children. What am I going to do? Helicopter them? I don’t think so. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t humanly do it. One child, perhaps, two children, hmmm, after that, There’s Just No Way. If I was inclined to hover over the safety of my children, which I’m not, I wouldn’t be able to because of the number of them. But, and here’s where I mourn and weep, even with me being very relaxed about risk and trouble, I live on a very busy street in the fishbowl of the church property. I’m not worried about them, but everybody else is.
So Gosh
I would love them to roam free across the landscape of Binghamton. I would love to give them ten bucks each and wish them good luck. But I’m so afraid of getting in trouble that I won’t ever do it. In fact, I strictly adhere to all the non legal insane cultural norms swirling round me, like lugging a whole boat load of kids into each tiny store for something that should take me two seconds because I am afraid, really truly afraid, of the officiousness of strangers. But, inside the boundary of real anxiety and fear, I give them as much freedom as I can possibles get away with, even if it means clashing with people who think I’m letting them be unsafe. And, whenever possible, I snark and malign the cultural norms to the childfen, full throatedly criticizing even myself for following them.
And on that note, I better stop this and see in what manner they have wrecked everything, even though this is a thought half considered.
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