I’m working through these exercises by Dr. Stephan Poulter in his books The Mother Factor and The Father Factor.
Here are some of the questions:
* What are five things that you would have liked to have done with your father prior to graduating from high school?
* What would you like from your father in regard to your career and life choices?
And these questions made me think about my childhood and what I wanted from my parents and I realized that pretty much everything I wanted as a kid, I got. I had a freedom that I don’t see around me. Kids these days seem so scheduled and supervised by comparison. I guess the big city is a more dangerous place than where I grew up.
I grew up on Seventh-Day Adventist college campuses (Avondale and Pacific Union) and I pretty much had free reign to do what I wanted. I lived in safe places. There weren’t known predators around. And the things I wanted to do were largely benign.
So at age six and seven, I was spending my time in the bush around our home. I’d go off with a tomahawk and I’d chop down trees and blaze trails and build dams and kill insects and then take a break to come home for lunch. The most dangerous thing around Avondale College was the red-bellied black snake. I knew to look out for it. Otherwise, I was free to have my adventures. I didn’t enter school until second grade in January 1974. I was almost eight years old. Prior to that, my time was largely my own and I wandered around the bush.
When we moved to Pacific Union College in May of 1977, I was eleven. I spent that summer doing what I liked — holing up in the college library reading history books. I spent most of every summer at the college in the library reading what I liked.
At age 12, I took up marathon running. My parents did not approve. They thought it was excessive and possibly dangerous, but they didn’t stop me. The one thing they did to protect me was to prevent me from sleeping over night at the home of a mentor because he was a bachelor and people would talk. But they allowed me to go on trips with him as long as other people were around.
Nobody ever tried to molest me when I was a kid.
My older brother, when he was about 14, used to hitchhike on Sundays to go to races. He’d leave home in the morning and come home in the evening and my parents gave him no grief for it. Like me, he could wander where he liked.
I spent the summer of 1980 in Baltimore with my parents. Some days, I’d leave the house in the morning and just walk and wander all day. I knew the bad parts of town to avoid. And I’d just go walkabout.
After ninth grade at Forest Lake Christian School, I wanted to transfer to the public school so I could take journalism classes. My parents allowed that.
The one time my parents forbade me from reading a book was around seventh grade and the offending volume was The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. I never did read the thing. My parents weren’t thrilled by me reading East of Eden about a year later by John Steinbeck but they did not forbid me. Once I entered high school, they never tried to prevent me from reading any book.
In eleventh and twelfth grade, I’d often leave my home on Friday nights, saying I was going to a friend’s place, and instead I’d walk into Auburn and cover sporting events for the Auburn Journal. My home observed the Sabbath so what I was doing was a sin, but my parents never found out.
In 12th grade, I took the SAT on a Saturday instead of trying to arrange another day like the more observant Sabbath-keepers. My parents didn’t like this but they let me do it. My graduation was on a Saturday morning. My parents didn’t approve but they let me go along and graduate. They went to church instead of coming to the ceremony.
In 12th grade, I called several recorded phone sex lines from my home phone (for about a dollar a call). When my mom got the bill, she asked what the charges were and I said they were for college. She bought my explanation and I didn’t get into trouble.
I often heard my father proclaim that he was a great believer in human freedom. It seemed incongruous coming from someone who was so religious, but it was true.
