Dirt Roads

A number of things spring to our minds when we consider the whole situation with MJ (see previous post). First, thank God Jme wasn’t with MJ during his all night drinking binge that ended with a roll over that could easily have been fatal for the driver or any passengers. (MJ was fine by the way.)

Second, the whole issue of boys is one I had no idea we’d be even thinking about for the foreseeable future. I know the protective tendency of fathers of daughters is legendary, and fathers of daughters might object to counting me among their number, but I love Jme and want her to be successful in life as any father does, and I am abundantly confident that she does not need to be with MJ for a day, much less any longer. That fact is, there are no. males. here. period. that we could possibly approve of her spending any romantic energies on. It’s disconcerting to me that she could be aware of his excessively irresponsible behavior and still want anything to do with him. But she does. Eegad.

Third and finally, this town is no place to raise kids school aged or older. Living in the bush has been a wonderful experience for us, and we feel that is has been nothing but positive for Sonny Jim. He has experienced some really amazing things, but we’ve always thought that by the time he is ready for kindergarten or first grade, we’d surely be closer to the city. I’d never raise a teenager here. And yet here we are. The peer groups here are not a fertile field for cultivating healthy friendships. I can go down the list of teenagers in my head, and there is only a small percentage (a small percentage of a small number is a very small number) that I don’t mind Jme spending time with. There is truly very little to do here for teenagers. The only thing to do is go over to someone’s house to hang out, completely unsupervised for hours at a time. I read another blogger recently who was recounting his experiences as a rural high school student in a town with nothing to do on a Friday night but drive down empty dirt roads and get loaded. He wrote about how neither he nor his friends would ever have admitted it at the time, but that it was incredibly depressing to have nothing better to do on a Friday night that driving down empty dirt roads and getting loaded. That is exactly where I feel like the teenagers in this town are.

Wifey has talked about moving out of the bush and back to the city. The idea has rapidly grown in appeal over the past couple of weeks, but I don’t think there is any way we can manage a move and a job change this summer. So we’re hunkering down for the year to come.