RESPONSIBILITY – DO WE NEED MORE COPPERHEADS IN OUR LIVES?

By now, most people know that I often quote my Uncle Ken. His eldest child, my cousin Gaye, is an accomplished writer. She has published a book of her memories and observations. Her recall is far better than mine, and I am amazed at the details she can remember about her childhood, and indeed her entire life. She married at 17, later divorced, raised two daughters, and graduated with a nursing degree and a Master’s in Nursing Education. Gaye is now 80 years old and a great-grandmother. But she continues pursuing her passion to write meaningful stories about life as she experiences it.

This is an excerpt from one of her recent stories.

Responsibility is about who we are and how we live together. It’s about being responsible for choices and actions, and how they impact others. This is something that was instilled in me as a young child and something I try to teach each generation. It gets harder for me as children are given fewer responsibilities. They get the concept on a personal level, but including others is harder for young children to grasp.

My main role models were Grandpa Hoots and my dad, with Grandma and Mom also influencing me. I shadowed Grandpa for the six years we lived with them. They were fast and firm in taking charge and giving directives. When livestock breached the fence, they intervened promptly, instructing me to go indoors while they guided the animals back into the enclosure or pasture and secured them until the necessary repairs were completed.

Until I was six, the only chores I had were helping to harvest fruit or potatoes and raising the runt pigs. I bottle-fed the pigs, and they quickly responded. I think that was the beginning of my nursing career.

We moved to Marchmont [an old Victorian mansion] when I was six, and my duties expanded. Mother grew uneasy in the big house, worried about copperhead snakes because the grounds hadn’t been maintained. She no longer had another adult there, and she refused to let me leave if Daddy was gone, except to go to school. I assumed responsibility for leadership in his absence.

We heated with wood stoves, and I was responsible for bringing up the wood, stored in an old unlighted garage down two flights of stairs from the house. Although snakes had been spotted in that area, I was warned to be cautious, and a sharp hoe was kept there just in case. I learned to use it. Today, we would not place a child in a situation like that, but that was then, and I learned a lot from the experience.

[This and other experiences] served me well as a nurse, and taking charge came naturally for me. As the eldest child, I believed in taking responsibility and acting quickly—either lead, follow, or move aside.

This is much harder to teach children today, as their roles are perceived differently and they are given less leeway and are protected more closely by parents and society.

In a conversation with Gaye, after reading her essay, she discussed with me in more detail her chore of bringing firewood and how it developed in her a sense of responsibility at the age of six. The family knew the wood pile was infested with copperhead snakes but figured she could manage that challenge. She was expected to use her judgment, be wary of the snakes, and if she saw a copperhead, Uncle Ken told her to kill it with her hoe.

This went well until the day something happened that caused Uncle Ken to modify his instruction to her about killing snakes. She had killed an exceptionally large copperhead. She showed it to Uncle Ken. He stretched it out, and the snake was longer than Gaye’s hoe handle. So, he told her that if the snake appeared to be longer than the hoe handle, it would be dangerous, big enough to strike her. She should give the snake a “commutation of sentence” and leave it alone.

While her emersion in responsibility eclipses any that I had, her story very much exemplifies the responsibility that our parents and grandparents taught her and me. Those early lessons seem antiquated and reckless compared to the way we see parents raising their children (and young adults who still act like children) today - often referred to as “helicopter” parenting.

My favorite example is a story I heard about a mother who said she was going to drive from Charlotte to Durham at Easter. Her son was a sophomore at Duke. Last year, when he was a freshman, he couldn’t get himself to Raleigh-Durham airport for a flight, causing him to miss his Spring Break event. So, this year, she would drive down to be certain he would make his flight.

My thought: “What the heck is he doing at Duke University if, as a twenty-year-old, he doesn’t have enough gumption to get to the airport without his mother holding his hand?” (She also said that she sometimes drives down to Durham for a day or two to help him with term papers.)

I believe this is not an isolated case of “helicopter” parenting. And I ask, “How are we preparing our children for the challenges they will surely face in their lifetime. Will they know enough to pick up the hoe, or will they be unprepared for the “copperheads’ that life sends their way?

Perhaps our youngsters would be better prepared if they were exposed to some “snakes in the woodpile” before they go to college.