Needless to say it got me thinking a little bit.
Do you realize that if you are above the ripe old age of 22 and sitting here reading this, you are damn lucky to be alive. No seriously, I mean it. Hell if you are older than me and sitting here reading this then hot damn! you must be immortal.
When my mother was a child, her mother took her out to the cotton field in the sun and she picked cotton. She lived in a house that had a tin roof and was made other wise of nothing but wood. They climbed the tree in the front yard and shook pecans out of the topmost branches. They went swimming in the swimming hole on the family property. If you peed in the swimming hole no one cared. They went exploring in the woods.
The picked berries off the vine, they drank milk from the cow, they twisted the necks of chicken, took off the feathers and cooked the damn thing and that was dinner.
When my mother was a child she played outdoors from sun up to sundown regardless of bugs. And she did it skirts and dresses. She risked extreme sunburn and melanoma. There was no west Nile virus or if there was, it was still on the Nile, and nobody gave a hot damn. If my mother got bit by a bug, my grandfather put some whiskey on it and boom it's was all good. If my mother fell out of the afore mentioned tree and broke her arm, one of the elders in her family probably wrapped it up and there was no investigation as to why the child was in the tree.
Do you realize that my mother is so lucky to be alive?
When I was a child. I played outside. I woke up in the morning ready to hit the pavement regardless of how hot it was because if I was able to go outside and play then hell, it was a good day. I drank from water hoses, I tromped around in the great outdoors wearing shorts that would make Daisy Duke proud. I wore flip flops and poked at strange things I found in the woods with sticks.
I didn't go swimming in swimming holes because by that time (A scant 30 years of civilization later) it was bad. There were things in there so instead, I jumped in head first or belly flopped into slightly chlorinated water. If you cam across a warm spot in that water no worries, the chlorine eradicated it soon enough. I didn't have to wear sunblock outdoors but I did have to have that oh so healthy layer of Vaseline slather on me to protect my skin and consequently make me shine like a shiny eight ball that could be seen from space when the sun shined right.
I didn't drink milk straight from the cow because by the time (again a scant thirty years later) it had to be pasteurized. I did however, get little Debbie's for breakfast, drank strawberry Quik like it was going out of style. My cereal was frosted and I STILL added sugar to it. My bread was full of gluten and it was white or brown. I ate butter, not margerine, and my vegatables came from a can.
When we climbed trees, it was at camp with a spotter or a group of friends standing below us and if we fell and broke our arms we went to the Doctor who wrapped it up, gave us a lollipop and told us to be careful next time.
When I was in the fifth grade, I came home to my house all by myself and let myself in with my key and did my homework and watched television and ate a snack while my mom finished work and came home. If she had someplace to go at night, the girl next door came over and babysat me and we watched television and the girl did my hair until it was late enough for me to be yawning every five minutes and just when we saw my moms head lights, I was told to scramble back to my room and pretend like I had been sleep for the last two hours.
We went to the store and I wanted things and I pestered my mother for them relentlessly. She looked at me and in her most threatening voice told me what she was going to do if I kept it up. If I kept it up I got a whooping right there in the store. Other mother might have seen me getting my ass whooped and said "I have to do the same thing in the toy aisle" The bruises on my ass can tell you for damn sure that not one time did CPS come and save me from that nor did my mother end up on the evening news as a child beater.
I lived through all of that and I survived. Holy crap am I lucky!!
We are now sixty years from when my mother was a child and while my children play outside and don't actually have to be home until the sun is no longer in the sky there are some that have to be in at a certain hour. Sometimes, my kids decide that the movie on TV or the computer game is more exciting than playing out in the sun.
And if they go out in the sun, God forbid I slather them down in Vaseline? No I have to use SPF 6000 because after millions of years of kids running around in the sun, it can now kill you. My kids go into the woods? Are you nuts?!?!? Do you know whats in the woods?? There's bugs, and snakes, and pedophiles hiding in those trees. There's rocks to trip over, trees on paths, birds that could pick your eyes out.
And swimming! they still swim and in the same pools as I did but that warm patch, well you know not to go near it now because it turns dark blue to alert everyone that someone peed in water. The Chlorine that eradicated it when I was a little girl still gets rid of it but not before it says to everyone "Look that kid had to pee!!!" At which point EVERYONE has to get out of the pool and the area has to be sanitized. Cause you know pee inside our bodies won't kill us but swimming near/through someone else in a pool filled with bleach more or less is going to cause untold damages.
If my kid climbs a tree which I think is an extinct sport now and falls out of said tree and breaks his arm, I have to answer a million questions at the hospital explaining why was my child in the tree? How tall was the tree? Why didn't I catch him? Where were his spotter? Was I paying attention to my child? And on the heels of that CPS will want to launch a full investigation into my child falling out a tree.
Not only does milk have to be pasteurized now, it has to have water added so that it's only 2% milk cause in the last 60 years cows have ganged up on us and not only created mad cow disease, tainted their milk so that drinking it the way that God intended is bad. And not just Bad, super bad. Vegetables still come out of a can but now before that can was sealed the vegetables were cleaned and homogenized and sterilized and all that stuff that basically means we killed the shit stuffed it in a can and made sure than nothing that signifies that this kernel of corn or green bean ever actually saw sunlight or felt soil is left evident on it. Killing, cleaning and cooking a chicken now? As if! First of all, that chicken is bad! He has a disease. Not sure what it's called but it probably has something to do with him being mad. He has been fed steroids because he was too small. (His steroids cause boobs to grow way bigger and way faster on girls now. Where the hell was THAT chicken when I was growing up?!?!?)
If my kids find berries on a vine now, they have to look it up to see if it is poisonous and then they still can't eat it because even though it's wild it may have been sprayed with insecticide, because I mean after millions of year helping fruit and berries grow, insects have now decided that spreading diseases is a much better use of their time.
My kids can't come home from school and let themselves in with their very own key. Why? Because ther's all sorts of dangers in my house that could kill them if they were left alone for an hour or two. NO, now I have to fill out forms and sign them up for school based after school programs that will keep them safe from harm and Spongebob until I get off work. Cause you know, after six hours of school, kids only want more school. If I have to go out at night, the girl next door has to have a background check before she can come over and watch my kids. She can't do their hair because well, that would be bad. I don't know how exactly but that would be bad. And there's nothing on for kids past a certain hour most places so staying up is pointless unless you have uber cable and they can't stay up anyway because after years and years of kids staying up late, studdies now show that children HAVE to have their eight to ten hours of sleep or who knows what calamity will occur.
If my kids want something in the store enough to pester me for it, I can't turn to them with my Exorcist face on and tell them what I'm going to to do to them if they keep at it, because I'm threatening them. I can't reach around and spank one of them for bugging me about cocoa krispies because then I assaulting my child. And the Mom that passed me in the aisles when I was a youngster getting that very same spanking, now rips my child out of my arms, tells me what a horrible mother I am while at the same time calling the police. By the end of the day, I'm on the nine o'clock news as a convicted child beater.
Let's not go into furniture. The high chair that my mother sat in as a baby could have wood rot and worms and kill me, so my mom brought a brand new metal and vinyl one when I was a baby but by the time my kids were born, it could have rusted and the vinyl torn and my kids could get tetanus. The playpen my mom played in as an infant (Rolling my eyes because my mom grew up in the country in the forties) could have so many many bad things in it so when she had me, she had to get the big Graco one that took up millions of miles of floor space. But I couldn't use that when my kids were babies bcause in twenty years the metal had suddenly decided to buckle and trap my kids inside while the mesh screen would work its way around their throat and down their windpipe if it tore. My moms toys would have killed me and my toys would kill my kids.
What happened over the years? I sometimes think that I would have loved to have been a child even back before my mom was born. They didn't have a million and one vaccines. If they got the chicken pox, they itched for a few days and it was gone. Do you realize, my kids have never had the chicken pox and probably never will because there's a vaccine for it. I had the chicken pox so bad it was in the corners of my eyes and you know what? Moms from all over bought their kids to sit in the playpen with me because they wanted their kids to have it. Children have survived a whole bunch of stuff but over time people have forgotten that and the people that do remember that, are considered quacks and freaks because they like me, believe that what didn't kill our elders will not kill our kids.
Terminally Single and Blogging is well... there is no word for what I am right now. I guess since I'm alive, the best I can say is I am sure as hell damn lucky to be so...
