Growing up with a sad mom, a sleep deprived maid and a workaholic  father, we mostly governed ourselves.  I’m not quite sure how we survived our childhood, but we did.  We were unsupervised, unprotected, and undisciplined.  It was unfettered freedom at its best. 

Not just in the general sense that our parents did not hover like helicopters. Not even in the broader sense that  our generation did not wear helmets, or seat belts, or use car seats. We didn’t wear shoes all summer, we played outside until dark, sometimes after. We learned to swim by being thrown into the deep end. We kept track of our own school work. We set an alarm clock and got ourselves up and dressed in the mornings.

When I mean we weren’t supervised, I mean we weren’t supervised.  We trespassed onto neighbors property to fish in their ponds and were brought home by the police.  We were dumped drunk at the back door by our dates.  We dug underground tunnels to connect our forts.  We drove with a coed group of friends to Destin for Spring Break with no pretense of a chaperon. We swung by our knees on an unanchored swing set. We did flips off our boat house roof into the lake. We stood on the seat of our stingray bikes as they sped down our hilly street, crash landing in order to stop.  We played poker, played in the middle of the street, had fake IDs.  We carried our friends’ dog up the tall water slide on our dock and let sent him slide down into the lake. (before you get all PETA on me, he enjoyed it). We shot guns in the back yard. We threw snow balls at cars, sometimes with rocks in the middle. We were driving by the time we were 13, usually making shopping runs for our parents. We were given sips of beer by the neighbor during barbecues. We dove off diving boards before we knew how to swim. When I say we, I mean mostly me and David. (Melisse was well behaved and I looked after her, except she was the one who knocked her tooth out on the side of the pool.)  But we survived with  no broken bones, a couple of chipped teeth, a ruptured spleen, a few stitches here and there.  

Sure, I wish we had been a Norman Rockwell family, but I wouldn’t trade the freedom for anything. It is what shaped my independence, made me self sufficient, gave me the resiliency to stare down this damn disease without blinking. (OK, sometimes I blink). And it’s given me a treasure trove of memories to write about.