You Let Your Daughter do What???

If you are a parent, you know about comparing stories with other parents. Sometimes it's more a competition than anything else - who can tell the cutest story? Whose child is the smartest? Each parent has a story to top yours.

Not so with my daughter. When I tell a story about her, other parents are left speechless. They have no story that is comparable, and I can tell they are praying that they never have one. My husband asks why I tell these stories given the reactions elicited, but I can't help myself. I have to see the humour in them, or maybe I'm hoping that someone will say - "Oh yes, my child also took off all her clothes, climbed the fence and walked to school butt naked."

"Really?" I'd say. "How did you handle that?"

Because when my daughter did that, I was at a loss...

I saw a fellow church member walking down the road from school hand-in-hand with my naked three-year-old while she happily chatted away. He arrived at the gate and laid into me - Why would I let my baby go to school by herself? Didn't I know any better? How could I let her run around naked?

Like that was planned. (Just so you know, we dressed our daughter constantly, but she was very determined to be naked. Thankfully, she has outgrown that tendency.)

I listened to the long tirade from the very offended man, thanked him for bringing her back, and let my daughter in the locked gate.

As I dressed her once more, I reminded her (sharply) that she mustn't leave the garden without me. I reminded her (completely exasperated) to come in the house and change her clothes if she needed to. I told her, under no circumstances, was she to go visit Daddy at school without me. And she didn't ever do the latter again. But it boggled my mind that she did it in the first place, even if she was only three.

Then I thought back to my childhood in Malawi:

• I played outside by myself almost every day, all day.
• Because it was so hot, I was in my underwear most of the time.
• I took it into my head to cross the road and visit my best friend without telling my Mum. Hopefully, not in my underwear. But I wouldn't put it past me.
• We didn't have a fence to climb - all I had to do was walk through our spindly hedge.

Not too different from my daughter's little anecdote. But today, this story earns a different reaction.
I've seen it in the shocked faces of young parents to whom I've told the story, as well as in the outraged tirade from the Antiguan who brought her home.

But I loved the freedom I had growing up. I remember those days with nostalgia. It gave me great joy to provide my children with a little of that same experience in Antigua. My daughter played outside all day, every day. When he was younger, my son went out to play with neighborhood children and dogs every day he wasn't at school - I didn't hear from him until he was hungry or hurt (and even then he didn't bother coming home unless he was streaming blood - but that's another story).

We wanted the children to be safe. So we had a fence around the garden, a locked gate, and three big dogs. Our doors and windows were open so I could hear if the children needed me, and I worked in and out of the house all day. So, whether it was right or wrong, I let my children have the freedom to explore their world. But I have learned to curtail the stories I swap with other parents...

What Do You Mean?

 I received a work-related email asking me if I had the bandwidth to do a certain project. I thought, "What a dumb question. I work at a University with high-speed Internet - I have the bandwidth to do just about any project you want." My reply to the email was more politically correct - "Of course. I'll send you the finished project next week."

However, when I received a similar inquiry a few weeks later, I had to ask my boss, "Am I missing something? Because this colleague keeps asking me if I have enough bandwidth and I can't see why she would be concerned with the amount of data my Internet connection can handle."

My boss was astonished at my confusion. She explained that in the world of business 'bandwidth' is a commonly used term -"She means do you have the resources and time to complete the project."

One of the advantages of my masters' studies is that I can apply the skills and knowledge learned in just about any field; I only have to learn the language and culture of the field. And I have worked in several different fields now - environment, education, business. But there are always some words in each field that I assume I know what they mean based on past experience only to find myself in a communication snafu.

Maybe it is because of my age, but it seems that there are more words like this in the business world than in the other fields with which I've dealt. In my current position, I felt like celebrating the first time an interoffice meeting made sense to me. Before that, they might as well been conducting the meetings in Dialect for all I understood.

I wish companies gave culture training to new recruits, like that we received in Peace Corps. High on the list would be a list of "commonly used vocabulary that do not mean what you think they mean" and "how to behave in these commonly faced situations."