Parenting.com: The freedom of bad mothering

It was the 1970s and I was between the ages of four and 12 when my family lived in the Miami version of the Boonies — Perrine. It was a haul to get there, down U.S. 1, past the Miami Serpentarium, endless pine trees and not much else. En casa del rayo.

The family next door had three kids at home and I spent a lot of time with them. They took me crabbing at “los pinitos,” to a relatives farm where they plucked chickens and promptly fried and ate them, and to their eldest son’s house just for hanging out. On these adventures, four of us would pile up in the dad’s junker of the moment. The car I remember most had a huge rusty hole in the floor board. Watching the road from the bench seat — and without seat belts — was mesmerizing.

Do you imagine allowing our kids today to sit in the back of a junker with a hole in the floor, and without seat belts? What sinful heaven we deprive them of!

There’s an episode of Mad Men that captures the huge difference between the parents of the 1950s and the parents of today. The little girl put a dry cleaning bag on her head and proclaimed herself an alien. The mother, smoking with her pregnant friend, warns her that the clean clothes from the bag better not be on the closet floor. She doesn’t blink about the kid potentially suffocating. I love that scene.

Not that I would let Maria walk around with a plastic bag on her head, but I wish we had some of the “eh, whatever” attitude of then. I think we mothers would sleep better if so.

I guess I want to be more of a “Bad Mother.”

In that vein, I write about Ayelet Waldman on Parenting.com today. She’s been called a bad mother, but I bet she’s not.