Notes from Grandparents
The Naked Truth
By Mike Rogers
Feb 14, 2007 - 4:48:45 AM

      When I was about 8 years old, growing-up in a small town in Kentucky, one day I decided that I needed to escape my plight in life.   I was going to run away from home!   

     You see, I had an older brother who thought that he was the center of the universe, and quite honestly, I think he had convinced my parents that he was.   It was in stark contrast with my status in the family.   You see I was tender-hearted and all my dad had to do was give me a   mean look and I would cry.   He seemed to take delight in making me cry at the dinner table.   I have often wondered if he felt a need to exert his power because he worked for a boss who made Attila the Hun look like a wimp, and this was his way of restoring his manliness.   I don’t know.   I didn’t want to cry, but honestly – he scared the ____ out of me.   He ran our lives as if we were in his 82nd Airborne platoon from WWII.   To make matters worse, I was really skinny and small.   My parents would take me to the doctor almost every year and ask him what was wrong with me.   “Why is Mike so skinny?” my mother would ask him.   “Do you think he has worms?”   I think they tested me for everything known to modern medicine and nothing ever showed up.   

     Well, I began having day-dreams about traveling across the country hitch-hiking and living off the land.   Running away really seemed like a good idea at first.   But certain thoughts made me ponder my decision to leave. When I took the garbage out after dark, I would run that 50 yard dash out and back pretty quickly, because I never knew what might be after me.   

     However, one day, when I was under my mother’s favorite threat of “you wait till your dad gets home, he is going to wear you out…”   I told her I was going to run away from home and she would never see me again.   She stopped folding clothes and looked at me for the longest time, like she was carefully selecting her words.  

     She said in her strong south Georgia accent, “Michael, if you want to run away from home then go ahead.   I ain’t gonna stop you.   All I ask is that you go the way the Lord gave you to us…buck naked.   Just take off all your clothes and head on down the road.   Cause you don’t own anything except the skin on your skinny butt.   So get busy and take them clothes off and get on down the road!”

I was shocked – and after a clear visual image of my skinny butt running down the road in such a way that all the people in town could get a good look at me, I decided whatever my Dad was going to dish out was not as bad as the embarrassment I would endure running away from home.   

     It has been about 48 years since then, and I still see that day as vividly in my memory as the day it happened.   In retrospect, I knew that my mom loved me and would have been absolutely beside herself if I had really run away from home.   What I appreciate now is the wisdom she showed as she illustrated – in a memorable way – the consequences of my choice.   Parenting requires an abundance of creativity, toughness, tenderness, and love.   It is definitely not for sissies.   Being an effective parent is recognizing that sometimes, as hard and difficult as it might be, helping our children see the potential consequences of their actions actually may help them learn how to make right decisions in their lives.   

     As difficult as this is to do, it is the “naked truth” about life-changing parenting or grandparenting.  

                                    “GaDa” (Granddaddy)

                                    Mike Rogers