When I was younger, my brother was hit by a car. I was there and I saw it. So did my mother.
We were walking into town and I think Mum’s mission that day was to return a faulty iron or something as equally mundane. I would have been no older than eight, my brother almost 11.
That day was like almost any other day, except for the heavy rainfall the night before. Because of this, there was a lot of water on the road and as we walked single file on the side of the road, facing the traffic, Mum called ahead to my brother to ‘get across the road before the next car came along and splashed us’. He, being a literal kind of kid, took off, straight across the road and into the oncoming traffic. Directly into the path of a white panel van driving down the road at 60kms an hour.
My mother had meant for him to go dead ahead, not across into the traffic. She would question her turn of phrase so many times in the coming years that she would almost turn herself inside out.
He was thrown a good 40 metres along the road, into the air, his face skidding along the bitumen, until he collided with a guard rail which stopped his decent into the free flowing creek below. He got lucky. We got lucky.
Parents investigated for neglect after letting children walk home alone
Ironically, prior to that day, my mother was very strict in her parenting style. In fact, it could be said she almost invented ‘Helicopter Parenting’. She walked us to and from school each day and we most certainly didn’t cross a road without her hand firmly holding ours. She knew everything there was to know about us and nothing concerning either my brother or myself was ever left to chance.
That all changed after my brother was hit by that car. I became the very opposite of the child I once was. Suddenly it was like my mother had an epiphany. She realised that she couldn’t control everything and that maybe, by holding on too tight, the very thing she was terrified of most had happened anyway. That’s why I’m guessing we became what is now known as “free range children”, seemingly overnight.