Outside Time: Then and Now

One thing I have realized through this whole quarantine bit, is that my kids do not know how to play outside the way I did when I was little. When we have one nice day in a seven day week, I swear to God they open the door and look up toward the sky, like they are looking for E.T. to descend upon them. They circle the yard like Edward Scissor hands, not really sure where to go and hiding when neighbors drive by.

I don’t want you to judge me, but sometimes after failing at google meet, sucking at teaching both my two kids of two different grade levels, and it’s only 10 am and I don’t have Dr. Shah yet to comfort me. I open the door and say get gone. Without their I-pads, without those x- box remotes, those kids often times sit sullenly on the porch and look at their sneakers. Now it’s not that they are not creative and maybe they are still wistfully waiting for Miss Diane to pick them up on the school bus. But I mean really?

Rewind to when I was little and we knew how to play at that point. Sometimes I look around and I am downright shocked we made it, my siblings and my cousins I mean. It is so funny to me now how protective and reactive I am with my own children because although I was raised by a slew of loving adults, they did not give two f’s what we did outside.

Case in point: When I was 10, no maybe it was nine. I used to go to the Windsor Fair on bracelet night and my parents would buy us bracelets for broken down rides, hand us twenty dollars for the six of us and wave goodbye for four hours. At this juncture, my older brother and sister would go their own ways and honestly who could blame them? My brother was at a point of his life, when he was wearing deodorant, button up jeans and wanting to hug something other than his 49ers comforter. My older sister has just always been exponentially cooler than me, with a wide assortment of friends. So that left the four of us to roam the fairgrounds by ourselves. Now I know my parents weighed the ups and downs. They must have said there is power in numbers, they will stick together, plus also those kids are so damn annoying that any kidnapper will give them back in five minutes or less, but still. I think about setting my son loose as an eight-year-old for the evening with his buddy Drew and hands down, I picture them in a Breaking Bad situation, helping greasy haired twenty somethings sell meth outside of the Tilter World. Is this misplaced fear that I have? Is it the television I watched? The details are fuzzy, but I do know that when my siblings and I walked out onto the midway on those warm Thursday evenings back in the day, that we were up to no good. I’m not saying we were the Herdmans, but we definitely pooled our resources to order a gigantic bowl of fries, doused with vinegar. We used every ketchup container available and that left 15 dollars left for gamboling and drugs. I’m completely kidding about the drugs anyway. We def gamboled in a teeny bopper sort of a way and by that I mean we ripped the eighty somethings off at Bingo. We also went into those religious campers that were probably mostly fine, where they want to preach the word of the lord, but you guys it was a camper, with adults we didn’t know, where the door got shut and crayons were offered. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to send my two into unknown campers where religion may or may not be happening. Somehow, by the grace of God we lived (HA!). We also roamed freely in and around livestock, sipping slush puppies and never brushing our teeth. Ahhh times were different then , weren’t they? Somehow, we never broke a limb on any of the fair rides and the tetanus shots held up.

I also grew up on a farm, which for those who also did you can attest that it is a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing in that there is just so much to do and by do I mean, take the four wheeler without permission, get thrown off the back of it, get stuck in between large round bales, almost get trampled on by a horse, have a rooster attack you on the daily, witness the aftermath of your guinea pigs getting eaten by raccoons in the garage, observe your Dad shoot poorly into the dark at a skunk in his underwear, swim in a pool unattended, dump expired dairy contents from New Mills into a pigs’ trough (do you see now why I love Tiger King, that was basically me with the Walmart truck), sneak your sisters in through the basement door when they came home too late, recreate Jerry Springer interviews in the living room, walk down the road to get water balloons at a store that mostly sold porn and only a few water balloons. Oh my god you guys, we were basically criminals.

On the other hand, we did not sit slumped against the porch, wishing we could be doing tiktok videos and watching a creepy man open easter eggs that contain cheap, worthless toys like the ones that are littered all over our bedrooms. I’m starting to think my parents had it right. Maybe they knew, if it couldn’t be solved by a shaker pack of kool aid and a little bit of hydrogen peroxide than whats the point really? When this social shutdown lets up, I intend to let my kids experience a little bit more of my wild childhood with their cousins. Now I don’t want anyone arrested, but it is clear to me they need to GET OUT of this house and let Momma have a minute. I am not their only source of entertainment. They need to find it out in the world, just like I did. Just not in a camper please…