As if life wasn’t complicated enough. It turns out that I can add “Bad Parenting” to my list of growing accomplishments.
You see, it all started decades ago when I was eight. Like my eight year old son I was a budding herbalist. I had a bad habit of “eating off the land.” I lived at the base of a dormant volcano and spent a great deal of time wandering up and down the mountain side. Alone! Something, I might note, I would NEVER let my child do now! What kind of mother do you take me for? I ate anything that wasn’t nailed down or classified as a
vegetable. I had enough sense to stay away from mushrooms and the odd red berry but my favorite and the favorite of every kid in the neighborhood was the small purple flowers that grew in abundance on the hill-side. We called them Periwinkles. We spent hours hunting these things down to pick off the purple flowers and suck out
the “nectar.” Ignorance is bliss.
Evidently, the “eat strange things that grow” gene was passed on to my child. And, due to a tip from his mother, one of his favorite pastimes is hunting periwinkles. He’s been told to stop eating flowers. He, unlike his mother, is not as sensible. We do not trust him to avoid mushrooms and the odd berry. We have suggested that people do not appreciate small boys climbing into their gardens to inspect what he might consume. We have lectured that picking other people’s flowers is both rude and technically
theft. We talk. He is eight.
Enter the dramatic knock on the door. Oh, you think you see this coming, but you have NO idea. IZ answers the door to find our neighbor, the mother of one of the Jr. Herbalist’s friends, just dropping by to let us know that the boys have been eating vinca minor and that she was so concerned that she called Poison Control. POISON CONTROL. She just wanted us to know that while the flower wouldn’t cause serious
harm, it still shouldn’t be ingested in great quantities and it probably wasn’t a good idea for them to be eating them in the first place.
Yes, not only was our child ingesting poisonous flowers, an outrageous behavior he learned from his mother, but he was caught red-handed in the act of corrupting other children. And he had to choose the kid with the most protective parents on the planet. Joy, joy. Yes, I can just hear it now, “But my mother said she used to do it all the time when she was a kid!” I’m sure that when that little detail makes the presses the next phone call will be to DCF. So, maybe the kid does have as much sense as his mother.
