AND THEN AGAIN………by Tamara Pettit

…..I admit I watch the tic-toc reels on Facebook.  The little snippets of shows or comedians or cute dogs brighten my day for a minute.  While  comedians who talk about their childhoods normally exaggerate to make it funny, the ones who talk about what it was like to grow up in the seventies and eighties are spot on.  I know. I was a mother in the “boomer” generation.  You remember us.  We were the laid back generation whose kids claim they raised themselves because we were oblivious to the dangers of the world.

…….First off, just let me say that we lived on Second Ave., New Cumberland and I just didn’t see any danger back then.  My kids got on their bikes and rode off in the morning and I didn’t see them until supper.   They played,  They rode bikes.  They went sled riding after the police closed off Kirpan’s Hill for them.   There actually was a commercial on TV  back then that said “It’s ten o’clock, do you know where your child is?”  The kids’ father and I would look at each other and marvel that some people didn’t know.  We knew.  Doug, age 13, would be down at the City Park playing basketball with his cousins Michael, Matthew and Brian Webster.   Wayne Neely was a teacher who managed the Park and he would leave the lights on so the boys could play basketball an hour longer.   At 11 p.m., Doug would get on his bike and head home to 2nd Avenue while the Websters would head up the road to Upper Town.   No worries, it was a small town.

…..We were the antithesis of the “helicopter parents” and child safety had thus far eluded us.  We had no car seats and our munchkins climbed around in the back and front seats like monkeys let out of their cage.  We prevented injury when we stopped suddenly by simply putting our arm out to catch our kid before he flew through the windshield.

……As parents, we caught a break.  The teachers at the jr. high and high-school were our age and our friends.   Doug and Shannon knew that if they misbehaved, it wouldn’t take a parent-teacher conference for us to find out about it.  It would be a phone call to the house that night.

……My nonchalant attitude towards parenthood came up last week when Shannon was diagnosed with walking pneumonia and the doctor wanted to give her a penicillin-based antibiotic.   She told the doctor she was allergic to penicillin.  He asked if her Mom was sure. She gave him the fish eye and said “probably not.”

…….It was time for the dreaded questions my kids pose. “Are you sure I’m allergic to penicillin?” “Of course I am,” I responded as I fell into the rabbit hole of parenting in the 70’s. “I wouldn’t just make that up.”

She wasn’t convinced, “Did I swell up or just get a rash?”

“You just got a rash,”  

She wasn’t giving up, “Where, on my face or my stomach?”

…….  In my mind’s eye I see her adorable chubby cheeks and feel that it must have been on her face, but then I had a vision of a rash on her stomach at some point, but maybe that was when she had Fifth’s disease and my sister had to come look at it just to assure me it wasn’t measles.

……I decide it’s too risky to commit so I just say, “Somewhere, you had a rash somewhere.”

“Did I swell up? Did my throat close?  What happened?” she was like a dog with a bone.

  “No, I would have noticed that.  You did not swell up.  In fact maybe you’re not allergic to penicillin at all.   Tell him to go ahead and prescribe it for you.”

    “I can’t take it if I don’t know.   You are my mother and you’re supposed to know those things.”

……But, I don’t.  We never questioned our pediatrician, Dr. Fisher, whose ire mother’s feared. He once reduced my sister to tears cause she had one perfume around her highly allergic son.  I got all my “learnin bout raisin kids” from my sister, Marsha because I had apparently been raised by wolves who took over when my Mom had a five-year memory lapse.  (We know I had Hepatitis when I was seven, but we don’t know what type.  My mother claimed I got it when I stood in line for the polio shot, but any attempt to nail her down resulted in her saying “Well, you lived through it and your eyes aren’t yellow anymore so what’s the problem?” My Mom knew how to shut me up.  I wish she was here to handle Shannon.

……For 53 years I have done the job Mothers are put on earth to do.  I scared Shannon to death of her allergy to penicillin.  And, now it appears she may not be allergic.  She is appalled and questioning  my credentials to motherhood.  What else could not be true and she says, “You are my mother aren’t you?”

……..”Don’t be silly, of course I am.  Who else packed all those sandwiches in hosiery bags cause she could never remember to buy baggies.  You were the only kid that took your lunch in a bread bag cause I couldn’t remember lunch sacks.”

……..That was me!   I was more concerned with raising you up to be a confident, empowered woman who could be anything she wanted to be than the minutia of motherhood.  And, please don’t ask again about that scar on your forehead.  I think Gramma Margaret was watching you and you were jumping on the bed while she wallpapered her bedroom while smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer.  Or, maybe it was when your brother talked you into barking at a stray dog and he bit you.  Whatever, it’s fine now.