Why I decided to stop being my daughter’s personal assistant-must read

[hunter]

25. My siblings and I were almost feral children.

My parents had too many kids too fast, more than they could handle.

We were safe and protected, my mom can be a grizzly bear, but that wasn't always a good thing. The school administration was often afraid to call her whenever I was in trouble. She'd either tear into me if it was my fault, or tear into them. It was usually best if the school put me outside picking up garbage or doing my schoolwork in the library.

On bad school days, I'd simply leave. That was my pattern in middle and high school. If the school called my mom to tell them I was missing, she'd usually say something like "Oh, he'll be home for dinner," and I usually was.

I quit high school for college, was asked to leave college twice, but eventually graduated, and my parents never knew any of the details of that. It was much like the shrapnel I sometimes took in my experiments with rockets and explosives. My brother, one day, after picking shrapnel out of my backside, told my mom I'd fallen into the rose bush. I'm not sure she believed that, but I'm not sure she wanted to know more either.

That's not a good thing. My wife and I, with our own kids, tried to maintain a happy medium between the anarchy I grew up in, and "helicopter parent."

Two of my siblings left home at sixteen, not because of any neglect or abuse, but because they were already self-sufficient. The two of us who quit high school are university graduates with further postgraduate educations. My youngest sibling stayed in the family home through high school and junior college after my parents retired from their day jobs and left to become full time artists.

I've never wanted to be anything more than a hunter-gatherer, parent, storyteller, evolutionary biologist, and pyromaniac artist. My parents named me well and never tried to break my spirit.