Growing Up in Suburbia
The hubby and I took Amelia for a walk on a newly paved greenway yesterday evening after a nice dinner out. Big sister Caitlin is off having a weekend retreat with our parents, which inevitably leads us to the conclusion that one child is a lot easier than two, but I digress. As we walked along the wooded path we came to a circular overlook which offered a nice view of the river below. “This would be such a great place to sneak off and drink beer if you were a teenager,” I said with a snicker. Now that I’m a 30-something mom of two, I suddenly revel in the idea of teens gone wild in our sleepy suburban town. If I see an abandoned empty six-pack of beer and a pack of Marlboro Lights by the park on a Saturday morning I automatically think, “Teens Gone Wild!” Ditto on graffiti. And I won’t go into the obvious, more disgusting telltale evidence we once found by a girl’s abandoned YMCA ID card by the Natchez Trace. At least they were practicing safe sex.
The hubby and I grew up in the same rural county. He lived in “town” and I grew up eight miles from town on a curvy rural road that I maneuvered like a bat out of hell on many a weekend night in my Chrysler Laser. Parties and parking, two clandestine staples of the high school pack…unless you were headed for a nunnery or life as a monk, neither of which are real popular here in the South…for the most part took place in farm fields. After all, cows don’t gossip.
If we stay in the suburbs, I wonder how it will affect our girls. Will they become mall rats, instant messaging their girlfriends and planning their weekends around the best sales? Or if we move out of suburbia, will they learn to be more creative like we were and forced to party under the stars under the watchful eye of a herd of cattle? Which, in retrospect, doesn’t sound half bad.
