Wednesday, March 18, 2009

My kid leads a pretty sheltered life, partly because he's an only child (translation: I've got to hang on to him because I don't have a Backup Kid), partly because he's related to me so he's kind of a hermit, and partly because we've never lived in a neighborhood with any kids his age (translation: any time he wants to hang with his friends, it had to be scheduled ahead of time and I had to drive him, which meant that I either left him there for a specific time frame or tried to be friends with the parent).

I never really thought it was all that bad until I read this and I realized how vastly different his childhood is from mine - I spent a huge amount of my childhood just hanging out with kids on my block (not to mention how much my world opened up when I got a bike) doing things without parental supervision. We didn't do anything dangerous, per se, but there had to be a small percentage of stuff that we did that wouldn't have gotten a parental stamp of approval.

Currently, we live 0.4 miles from my kid's school, this is the closest he's ever been to a school, so on his second day, it was decided that maybe he didn't need to be driven there and back. By the second week, he was asking me to meet him halfway home. By the third week, he was walking home by himself.

Of course, the first time he walked home by himself (which was actually kind of an accident, I was dying from the flu and happened to be leaving a couple minutes later than usual to meet him, by the time I got out the front door, he was coming up the front walk), my husband freaked the hell out. It's not like he's got to go through a ghetto, adult district and junkyard/meth shopping complex to get home, it's a couple streets in a super quiet suburb. And he's 10. And he's a pretty smart kid, I'm not all that concerned about him going out of his way to approach a windowless van and inquire as to whether or not the person has any spare candy.

So it's been a couple of weeks that the kid has been successfully navigating the mean streets of Santa Maria to get home in one unkidnapped piece and finally my husband is starting to loosen up.

At least once a week, though, the kid comes home and says "Zach/Raymond/Jeoung Soo wanted to know if I could come over after I finish my homework". Normally, he's such a freaking mama's boy that he doesn't go, it's much easier to hang out at home and play Wii or make my husband take him to play basketball, but today, he says that Raymond and Zach want to play basketball at Zach's house after they all finish their homework. I appreciate that they all know that no fun will be had prior to homework being finished so I told him it was fine as long as he got the hell out of the house before his dad got home (otherwise he'd be stuck with a chaperone and what fun is that?)

Once the homework is finished, my kid calls Zach who offers to come pick him up. About two minutes later, this scruffy redhaired kid pedals up to the house and tells my kid to jump on the pegs of his bike. Knowing that my kid is as clumsy as I am and knowing that a trip to the emergency room would be served with a helping "I told you so" and an extra side of "he's never leaving the house again", I suggested that my kid take his own bike and away they went.

My husband gets home and mentions that the munchkin's bike is gone. I point out that the munchkin is gone, too and he gives me The Look. I explain that the homework is done and he's out with his friends. And that he's 10 and the umbilical needs to be cut at one time or another.

"When did you tell him to be home?"

"I didn't. I just told him not to be late."

He sighed with an unimaginable amount of frustration. "I know you're new to this whole parenting thing, but you kind of have to give them some kind of guidelines."

"But I'm not like all the other moms, I'm a cool mom."*

And right before five, guess who rolls up into the driveway, cheeks pink from the cold, hands filthy from whatever shenanigans they were up to and a smile plastered on his dirty little face?



*

Labels: adventures in shitty parenting