Mama Bear’s Greatest Fear
What’s your biggest fear as a parent?
The Blue Jay likes to walk. And walk. And walk. Particularly if she is annoyed at her mom for taking away both the computer and phone after she has been on both simultaneously for a mere … three hours. So off she went. Usually she will tell me what direction she wants to go in and I will tell her how far she can go before she has to come home. But tonight she was determined to go in both directions. So I told her she could go one way but had to check in on her way back. Which she did. But when she came home from the second leg of the walk, all was not right with the world.
She was a bit frazzled and excited. Just not herself. “Whew! That was close!”
Posted by Michelle
On March 22nd, 2008 under Disabilities, Parenting.
Comments: 3
Comments
Comment from MaxDamage
Time: March 24, 2008, 11:07 pm
A year ago I would not have probably understood this post to the degree I do now.
But now I have a daughter.
I’ve always been of the belief that child predators broke the bonds of the society who’s laws would generally protect them, and hence there is absolutely nothing at all inhumane or immoral about executing them. Heck, I’d even go insofar as to applaud the Roman tradition of displaying their heads on pikes along the roadways approaching town, to serve as both testimony and warning to others about our zeal in this area.
But that’s because it becomes personal, now. In defense of my family, all the manners Mom taught me are optional. I believe it was Churchill who once opined that if you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite. With respect to my family, I see no compelling reason to waste the time on what is clearly a side issue to solving the problem at hand.
I’m honestly quite amazed that I have this sort of reaction.
Being a problem-solver by nature, I did come up with an idea that might be worth batting around. Any area with up to 40K homes get a unique three-letter prefix on their car license plates. A-Z plus 1-9 cubed allows for 42K different combination. The letters and numbers after that are immaterial. Ponder it, when you see a car doing something stupid how many letters off that license plate can you remember? Generally the first three are about it. But if you take the make, model, and color of the car and narrow that down to the 40K people who make up those first three license plate digits, you’ve suddenly narrowed the search quite a bit.
Then it’s simply a matter of training the kids to look for badges and license plates on the cars. If she can tell you it was a white Pontiac 2-door with prefix ABC you’ve narrowed the number of suspects down to perhaps a dozen.
Department of Motor Vehicles types generally haven’t been too terribly keen on my idea, but the police seem to enjoy it. I guess it mostly depends upon how hard you have to work to implement it.
– Max
Comment from MaxDamage
Time: April 13, 2008, 11:33 pm
Oh, what’s my greatest fear as a parent? That I won’t be around to send my daughter off with her husband, and my family will have to live on a life insurance settlement and social security, or welfare.
But that’s a guy thing, I suppose. Bringing home the bread and the bacon we tend to define ourselves by how we provide for the family, traditionally.
The gender roles we are raised to repeat are interesting to gawk at as our society changes, but I suspect they’ve become hard-wired after so many years. Protector, provider, I leave a lot up to Mom on the raising of her. If my wife were a hard-charging Wall Street trader bringing home the money I’m sure our approach would be different.
– Max
Comment from Michelle
Time: April 16, 2008, 10:04 am
Max, I’ve been meaning to tell you. I really like your idea about the license plates. Seems simple, obvious, efficient.
Now if I could just figure out how to reasonably balance safety and protection against the need for independance. She’s still somewhat nervous of going for walks alone but is itching to get her bike out. And she proudly proclaims (problem solved, you see) that she will just ride in the church parking lot, practically next door. Only problem is that is exactly the spot where the car stopped in the above episode.
It’s absolutely amazing that I’m not gray yet …
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