Recently, as I walked through the produce section of a grocery store, I passed a sign that said, “Responsibly Grown Potatoes.” Naturally, I began to imagine “Irresponsibly Grown Potatoes.”
Would they be grown by a chain-smoking farmer, one who flicks his carcinogenic ashes on the crop?
Or, maybe they’d be raised by a tipsy fellow who stashes a hip flask in his farmer jeans. Every day, he’d stagger around the fields dousing the nascent plants with a little hooch.
Worse yet, that same man might drink and drive. All at once, my brain was flooded with disturbing images of cows, chickens and goats fleeing for their lives from the Irresponsible Farmer rampaging on his tractor.
These thoughts rattled me, so I let my mind drift. What about irresponsibly grown children? What would those parents look like? Had we ever been irresponsible parents?
Oh yeah…that time when Ian was eight.
Our youngest child, Ian, was born seven years after his older brothers. And by the time Ian was eight, we’d been child wrangling for eighteen years. We felt worn down and mildly confused. Ian happened to be an easy-going, quiet child. So, we relaxed our parenting style.
One Saturday morning, my husband, Bruce, and I met at Ian’s basketball game. We arrived in two cars, then gathered up Ian and headed, separately, to an electronics store to shop for a television. Bored, I went home after five minutes of shopping. Bruce, on the other hand, spent the next two hours checking out TVs in that store and other places.
When Bruce returned home, I didn’t see him walk in. A few minutes later, a friend phoned asking if Ian wanted to go to a production of Peter and the Wolf. I asked Bruce where Ian was. He looked at me blankly. “I thought you had him.”
Remember, Ian is eight, old enough to know his name, address and phone number, old enough to ask for help when left or lost. It’s been over two hours since we’ve seen him. We began dialing stores. At the first, a man answered. “Nope, no small boy here.” We received the same response at the second, third and fourth store.
By this point, I stood in the driveway, hysterical. Then I heard a still small sexist voice in my panicking brain, “Wait. A man answered at that first store. That guy responded so fast, he probably didn’t even look.”
So I called back that first place and asked for a woman, any woman. After I described our situation, she checked a side lounge of the store where she found Ian snoozing on a couch in front of a television that was looping The Pirates of the Caribbean.
When we asked Ian if he’d been worried, he said no because he knew that “Dad was a very slow shopper.”
Back to those potatoes. I’m not sure how Irresponsibly Grown Potatoes turn out. To be honest, I’m all for eating healthy food and protecting the environment. So, thank you to farmers who care enough to grow potatoes responsibly.
I’m also for responsibly grown children, but sometimes raising a child is more of an art than a science. And, years later, as we now have discovered, a somewhat irresponsibly raised child can turn out just fine.
More of Deborah M. Prum’s work can be found at: www.deborahprum.com