That Time My Parents Thought I Was Digging Their Graves…
That Time My Parents Thought I Was Digging Their Graves…
I was about 12 years old at the time and my parents had done something to piss me off. I have no idea what it was. I went to my room, mumbling the usually stuff under my breath that all kids do and then slammed the door. After a few minutes, I was still so pissed off that I went outside and into the backyard. We had a pretty big backyard that was mostly weeds I had to mow every so often.
I wanted to build an underground fort with a tunnel! I thought it would be cool so I started digging! I got one hole started and then a few feet away I started to dig another. I had no idea that my parents had taken notice of what I was doing. I was just a kid trying to make a cool underground fort with it’s own little tunnel. But, they saw something completely different.
I had always been a huge horror movie fan. I was into special effects makeup and I was always “killing” myself or doing other gruesome effects to surprise my parent when they came home. So when I ran past them to go outside and started digging two holes side by side they looked at each other and thought, the same thing. “Great, he’s digging our graves.” and then they laughed about it.
It’s funny how times change. Back then, I was just being a kid and completely unaware of how my actions looked to others. My parents never had any real concern that I was going to kill them but it did make for a good laugh at the time. However, if I was a kid in today’s world, I think my parent’s response would be of shock and concern for my mental health.
There’s been so many cases of kids killing their parents, kids shooting up schools that it’s just instilled in us now. Times were just different then. For example, I recall many times as a young child, just 8 years old and being allowed to walk around Disneyland by myself. My kids are college age now but even back when they were that young, I would never have let them walk around by themselves. I don’t care how safe Disneyland is. I just wouldn’t even consider it. And yet, when I was a kid, it just wasn’t even a consideration that it might not be safe. It was Disneyland, the happiest and safest place on earth.
Anyways, I never finished the tunnel. It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be and after a couple of hours of diffing in the hard, rocky earth that is Rialto, CA, I had had enough of digging and went back inside to watch another horror movie. As I recall, I think I was going to watch Friday the 13th part 2 or maybe it was the Howling for the 100th time? I think about trying to dig those tunnels a lot because always wished that I had finished them. Now, knowing that my parents had for a second thought I was digging their graves, it really would have been nice to have been able to show them a tunnel instead of just telling them that’s what I was doing.
On the other hand, had I known at the time, that they had thought for a moment I was digging their graves, I would have gone with it. Not with the intentions of harming them of course. But, the creepiness factor alone of digging graves in the back yard would have been priceless had I thought of it.
