Rules and Regulations

Piazza San Marco – almost empty. What a sight, even in the dark and rain.

Naïve as I sometimes am I thought and hoped that some of the buttons my parents used to push so successfully during my formative years had ceased to exist or healed over enough to no longer be readily pushable . Naïve – I admit as a recent episode shows.

It began most harmless the other day when I told my parents that I had booked an apartment for three nights in Venice for a long weekend. In my experience late November is the only time to visit Venice if you really want to stand a chance to encounter the occasional local, not just busloads of tourists from all over the world.

“But geek-boy is in school” my mother saw fit to say. I stare at her blankly. “So?” I think “One Friday away won’t damage his academic performance and a trip to Venice is way more educational than six hours of school, even if it is a double Latin.” Outwardly I continue to stare blankly and say something like “I’ll just take him out of school for a day.” I am thinking of California where this is accepted practice on occasion, sometimes life just interferes with schedules.

By now my mother looks highly alarmed “But they don’t like that.” she states. Such statements bring out the worst in me: trying to regiment my life by stating the likes and dislikes of some abstract entity referred to as “they” which could be the catholic church, the members of some club or association, the totality of all our neighbors or, like in this case, the school system of Baden Wuerttemberg just brings back teenage years and all the “one just does not do that” sermons I had to endure. With that comes teenage obstinacy.

“I don’t care what ‘they’ like” I can’t help but saying. Creating more alarmed faces, “they’ll” just have to deal with it.” Now I am on a role, words starting with f and b (bloody bastards being the friendly variation) come to mind and want out but are held back at the very last second.

I know it is futile to argue and so does my mom and so gladly after a little more sparing the topic gets changed but leaves me with the distinct feeling that as a mother I am a lousy role model and will be single-handedly through this act of defiance ruin my child’s chances in life – or worse yet, risk “their” wrath which will come done in full force on the innocent child.

Needless to say, we went to Venice, it was fun and way more educational than double Latin class and we had the chance to see San Marco Square pretty much empty. Okay, it was on a Friday in late November, after dark and it was raining. But still ….

Camp

So this morning in the daily local newspaper I found out about a three hour camp that is offered for free for kid’s my son’s age.  Since I am terribly behind on work and painting and finding furniture and about a billion other things I thought “cool, I’ll take him there.”

Fortunately, my little geek only sweats the small stuff but is cool with big changes and has never met a person he did not want to talk to.  So I dropped him off  no problem and picked him up three hours and two painted walls later and was given the whole story about their activities.

Turns out not only where they allowed to shoot nuts at each other with badminton rackets, they were also allowed to climb up trees and to bike around.  Geek-boy was incredulous – none of this would have ever been allowed at his after-school and camp, in fact pretty much everything, including picking up wooden sticks of finger length was considered too dangerous and hence was strictly forbidden. SO he couldn’t believe his luck.”

“Mom, we shot nuts at each other and it really hurt.”

“okay”

“They let us do this”

“oh, okay.”

“the teachers didn’t prohibit it, we just had to stand behind a line to shoot at each other, so we couldn’t stand like right in front of somebody and hit him with one of those nut-thingies.  And we could climb up the trees and make monkey sounds …”

You don’t want to hear the rest, trust me.

He loved it and I am happy for him to be able for once to not have to behave like an angle and not being told that finger-length and width sticks are dangerous weapons.  Nobody got hurt and to the best on my knowledge nobody got sued either.