The BetsyG-Spot

By BetsyG

I was driving out of my neighborhood this afternoon and noticed some children playing on a snow bank. As I drove past them, the little boy—he couldn’t have been more than 5—stood on the snow bank in a sort of victory dance.

A normal person might think, “Oh, there is a little boy standing on a snow bank,” and drive on. But I drove by exceptionally slowly, pulling as far away from that snowbank as possible, very nervous.

And at the bus stop each morning, I insist that no children stand on the snowbank when the bus approaches. I’m the crazy lady yelling, “Hey, you kids come down from there! Someone could get hurt!”

Why so much concern about snowbanks? When I was growing up, a child in my hometown was killed doing something having to do with snow. My recollection is that the child was standing on a snowbank, slipped and fell just as a car was going by, and was hit by the car. (I asked a classmate—and I’m blessed to be able to do such a thing—and she came out with a sledding story instead, but apparently some child died of something when we were little.) This has forever colored my view of snowbanks, and it’s just one episode that’s turned me into the type of mother who says, “You never know what could happen. When I was your age…” before relaying an obscure horror story.

Another formative childhood experience occurred when I read a book called Follow My Leader. This was one of the sensational books that made the rounds among the girls, like Go Ask Alice (teen drug addiction—there was always a waiting list for this one at the library) and Are You There God It’s Me Margaret, the iconic book about entering adolescence about a strange girl who actually wanted her period. In Follow My Leader, the main character played with firecrackers, which exploded in his face, leaving him blind.

From that point forward, firecrackers became an object of disproportional caution for me. The few times I’ve been exposed to them (they are illegal in Massachusetts), I have stayed a good 100 feet back, not wanting to lose my vision and all. This perhaps (okay, likely) unreasonable fear has leached into my parenting; my children weren’t even allowed out of the house when a friend lit off firecrackers in his backyard.

David Sedaris wrote a piece in Naked, called “Cyclops,” which rags on his father doing an extended riff on “Funny…until someone gets an eye poked out.” In “Cyclops,” his father finds potential danger in practically any object and issues an appropriately ridiculous warning to his children. I can relate. Oddly enough, I had a friend in my childhood who did essentially have her eye poked out when she walked in front of a dart someone was throwing. (By the way, there was just a whoosh of “Oh yeah! I remember that” rippling across Cyberspace, since many of my childhood friends are reading this.) If my children don’t shiver in fear every time they see a dart, I’ve failed as a parent.

I wonder how much of this is handed down through the generations. My father can see potential trouble in the road three miles in the distance. When I was a kid, like any child, I’d stick various limbs out the window. This didn’t seem to elicit much reaction from my parents. But if the head went out, suddenly there was potential to have it lopped off by an adjacent vehicle. A truck provided the most effective imagery for this fantasy. Or, better yet, a freight train. (It could happen.)

When I told my kids to keep their heads inside the car, they challenged me to explain how they could possibly be decapitated in this manner. I admit, I was stymied, but the handy, “Because I said so,” was there to bail me out.

I suppose the dangers we worry about come from our own particular experiences. My ex-husband has a scar above his eye from hitting his face on a nighttable when he was jumping on a bed, so, in our house, jumping on a bed is dangerous. (Personally, I worry more about the damage to the springs; at least I’m worrying about something.) A math teacher at my junior high school was a vehement enforcer of the “no snowball” rule, dashing out of class and into the courtyard to capture any offenders. He had a large scar on his face, formed by a rock that was embedded in a snowball that hit him the face. (I know: it happens all the time.)

You’d think my kids would be terrified by life, but it turns out they use caution only in the explicit circumstances they’ve been warned about. My middle son is a bit of a daredevil, in fact, and does parcour. It doesn’t worry me too much, though. I’m not crazy about him jumping off the deck, with its 10-foot drop, but as far as I know, no one’s ever lost an eye doing it.