My mother was the neighborhood mom. It wasn’t a good situation.
It started when Ma decided to pave over our entire backyard to make a patio. The concrete surface was perfect for roller skating, skateboarding and riding bikes. The kids around the area slowly started trickling in the yard when the weather was good. Then they started trickling into our house. Ma would cook for them, listen to whatever problems they couldn’t tell their parents, and basically play happy hostess. The people who were responsible for those kids were mostly ineffective parents and guardians. When they figured out that my mother didn’t mind having kids crawling over the house, they gladly pushed their kids off on her.
My late younger sister and I grew to resent the instrusions. My sister, myself and my younger brother were often pushed out of the way inside our own house in favor of the neighborhood hoodlums. Years later, my sister and I snapped on our mother for fawning over the area’s kids while criticizing her own, often in front of the outside kids.
These days, I wonder why anyone would put themselves in the position of being the neighborhood mom. People will dial child protective services just because someone raises their eyebrow at a kid. My mother didn’t realize what danger she put herself into many times. There was a garage in backyard before Ma had it torn down (she never knew how to drive, and had no desire to learn how or to have a car). She allowed some of the local teenagers to have parties there on the weekends. One day, Ma discovered the parties involved drinking, drugs and sex, and she stopped them. Now if the parents of any of the kids bothered to keep tabs on what their sprogs were doing, they could have jammed my mother up legally.
Besides, I would think breeders have enough to do with dealing with their own kids then being bothered with someone else’s rug rats.
