Wednesday, January 9, 2008

The laughter and the tears (from laughter)

Well, Alice at Finslippy has done it again.

She had an incident where she was a bad parent, so she solicited bad-parenting stories from her readers. (I submitted one about bad aunting, which is different, but I just wanted to be a part of the magic.)

She summarized the results in a hilarious post that made me laugh so hard I was gurgling in public on two separate occasions just trying to recount it.

Please read it, paying special attention the last story before you continue reading this.

Tesia and I were in grade school. I'd say we were in first and third grades, respectively. We missed the bus a couple times, as kids are wont to do. Fine.

My mother declared that if we missed the bus again, we were going to have to walk to school.

So of course we missed the bus again. We lived on top of a mountain in Connecticut. The trip to school was mostly downhill, but even the downhill part was really hilly, and pretty rural. My mother was concerned about us walking to school by ourselves, so she came up with a solution.

She drove slowly behind us the whole time, which I think might have been the worst part. I mean, it was totally embarrassing. Of course, if she weren't behind us I probably would have shit my pants from being afraid. I was so afraid of being kidnapped that I didn't even like to play in the front yard for fear I'd get snatched.

(Aside: It wasn't just me with the unreasonable fears. Once the little neighbor girl and I went for a long walk around the block, which is a misleading thing to say since the "block" was more than a mile around in our rural area. We were about halfway around and a truck slowed down by us and we both freaked out. It turned out it was trying to get into its driveway and we were frozen in fear beside it fearing for our lives and holding hands and everything. Awesome.)

So it was probably a good idea that she was driving 1 mph behind us making sure nothing bad befell us (outside of walking all the way to school, that is).

I wonder if she remembers this and how close she was to killing us, since she had to take time out of her actual life to drive 1 mph behind her lousy kids who could have just as easily gotten on a free bus for the journey. Maybe she will comment and tell us.

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2 Comments:

Blogger elizasmom said...

That is a great story! I love the parental vexation and protectiveness at war with each other here.

And I'm commenting because check this out:
I was reading the comments at Finslippy and saw you mention Holyoke, which is where I live, so I came over here because who blogs from Holyoke?, and your picture looked familiar and I have now figured out that you are the former neighbor of a friend (NB, won't use her full name here) who has since moved away from Holyoke, and that all three of us once attended a Young At Heart event together, back when I was Elizasincubator, not Elizasmom.

*Cue "It's a Small World"*

January 10, 2008 at 9:45 AM  
Blogger Jennifer Myszkowski said...

Weird.

You know what's funny? I was just recounting to a friend how I cried and cried and cried at that Y@H show, how amazing it was with the Drunk Stuntmen, etc. Then I was trying to think of who I went with and hell if I could remember.

There are lots of cool kids in Holyoke, but not many of them blog. Alas.

January 10, 2008 at 1:15 PM  

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