Kid marks 40 years despite dopey parents

We were kids ourselves — 24 years old — when our first child was born in 1971. What were they thinking when they let us take him home from the hospital? We named him Jason Wyatt and proceeded to do everything wrong.

We put him to sleep on his stomach in a rickety secondhand crib padded with enough bumpers to put out fires. When he was teething, we rubbed his gums with a diaper soaked in Jack Daniel’s, apparently imprinting the taste of the smooth bourbon in his memory.

When he was an infant, we put him in a carriage top and slid the top into the back seat. Infant seats? Three-way seat belts? Sun shades on the windows? Of course not. The only smart, careful thing I did was check out the references for a baby nurse I hired for two weeks. Turned out she also had a taste for Jack Daniel’s, and we had to throw her out after three days.

After he survived infancy, we fed Jason plenty of hot dogs and bacon and other nitrate-infused meats, and didn’t hold back very much on other food groups in the pyramid, like cotton candy and Cheez Doodles.

As a little kid, he rode his bike like a demon, apparently blasting through stop signs and causing automobiles to take out rows of primal forest to avoid hitting him. I know this because one of his teachers who lives nearby called me one day to squeal on Jason, saying he was seen riding on the sidewalk, careening around two older people with walkers. And just imagine, we allowed him to ride around the block without a squad of security people following him.

Were we naïve? Stupid? We trusted our neighbors. We let him walk home from the school bus stop when he was 7. True, he once threw his house keys up into a tree and they got stuck there, but that was the worst thing that ever happened.

Our mistakes multiplied. As Jason grew into his teens, my husband and I broke the cardinal rule of parenting: We never presented a united front. I wanted to enforce a curfew. My husband thought we could leave it to the good judgment of our 14-year-old. I freaked out when we discovered he had smoked pot. My husband belonged to the “boys will be boys” school of child-rearing.