When you're living your life things just seem to happen. There doesn't seem to be any plan or guide or schedule. Especially when you're a kid. Your frame of reference is what happens around you. Things that become routine like going out to play after eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast and not going too far from the house so you can hear Mom yell when it was lunch time and when the guy next door would come home from work and pull his car into the driveway which meant it was close to dinner time and sitting in front of the TV watching whatever it was Mom wanted to watch and going to bed with the TV still on and falling asleep to the flickering light from it in the dark room and the low volume of the dialog and music. Next day, same thing - unless there was school.
Mom was always there. There was always cereal in the morning, even though we were on welfare. I could go outside alone or with friends, play until I got called or got tired, and know there was a house to go into, even if that house was actually a 2 room apartment, one of 4 apartments in a converted center hall colonial house in Connecticut.
What you don't realize when you're a kid enjoying life is that someone actually is making decisions and doing things that you don't see or know about -- that is, you don't know about until you're older and you look back. That's what this blog is about. Recollections of an adult about his childhood and all the things his mother was doing that I knew nothing about until I grew up and became a parent myself.
