I’m a communicator – a storyteller, if you will – and for my entire career I was privileged to work with words and language. One of my greatest joys was helping others through particularly thorny issues and ensuring there was no misunderstanding between the giver and the receiver of a message. It should follow, therefore, that clear communication followed me home.

Not so much.

On the homefront, my family sometimes resembled that proverbial shoemaker’s family, whose children are poorly shod. There are many tales we still laugh about over the dinner table, but the forest fire story takes the cake.

“Mum,” began my teenaged son over apple crumble one fall evening, “My friends and I want to cook meat in the forest on Friday. Is that okay?”

When they were young

Near our house was a fabulous ravine, one of many in a town known for its green spaces, deep valleys and creeks. It was home to both official and unofficial trails that my three kids and I trekked along with Maggie the dog for years – since my youngest could toddle along without falling over the tree roots. We routinely scrambled down the banks, threw sticks for Maggie to chase, looked for wildlife (scat searching was a big hit when the children were young!) and generally enjoyed this special piece of nature that made us forget we were in a big built-up suburban area.

There was one particular spot, high above the creek where there was essentially no ground cover. With tree branches high overhead, far away from potential sparks, it was almost perfectly flat. Since the time we lived near there, and presumably for years before, there was evidence of small campfires that had been lit. More recently, someone had dug a pit right in the middle for greater safety.

When my SEA creatures – so called for the initials of their given names – were young, we had serious conversations during our forest walks about the naughty teenagers (such bad boys and girls) who had fires unsupervised and who drank – gasp – beer in the forest. Why would they do such a terrible thing?

My own teenagers

Back to the present. My teenager, on behalf of his friends, was now asking to be essentially ‘those’ teenagers.

Fortunately, they were a good bunch of kids, levelheaded and proud to be just a little nerdy. At least one of them had wilderness leadership experience and they knew how to be safe with a fire. And if you absolutely must a fire in the forest, this was the place to have it. So, in the perhaps naïve hopes of being a parent my kids would continue talk to about these things, instead of just doing them secretively behind my back, I reluctantly agreed to the plan, once we had talked it through.

At least I thought I knew what I was agreeing to.

The day for the big adventure arrived. I had stocked up on hotdogs, pop and the marshmallow and chocolate makings of s’mores. The forest adventure began before I got home from work, but as the sun set and it got darker, the teens all flocked back to our house, cheeks rosy from the cold, and full of excitement about their exploits.

I hovered, ever the anxious mum, to make sure things had gone smoothly. Things were looking good. Nobody was inebriated (mark one in their favour). They had returned the bucket they had used to fully extinguish the fire (mark two in their favour). Garbage and recycling had been put away (mark three). But that’s when I noticed the blackened frying pans.

Frying pans?

My poor pans

“Oh,” explained my son, a little confused as to why I was asking. “We used them to cook the bacon.”

Bacon?

Apparently, I was supposed to have understood that “Mum, my friends and I want to cook meat in the forest,” meant bacon. And bacon, of course, demanded frying pans!

But over a campfire? Teen logic reigned again. We had a gas cooktop at home, so those very same frying pans are used over fire all the time, weren’t they?

By this point, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh hysterically, or yell at the top of my lungs. In the end, laughter won out because after all, these kids had responsibly built a fire, cooked a meal, made sure the fire was stone cold and had even come home sober. With a little elbow grease, most of the forest fire blackness was scrubbed off and the frying pans are not much worse for the wear.

Should I have endorsed this adventure? I’m sure some would vehemently disagree with my decision, but in this world of helicopter parenting and attempts to ensure risk-free childhoods, important things were learned.

My son and his friends were reminded that I trusted them enough to do slightly screwy and slightly risky things –and that it was safe for them to talk to me about them in advance so we could discuss safety and possible outcomes – rather than going behind my back, doing them secretly and risking the consequences. Because realistically, as teenagers, they were going to do those things, whether I know about them or not. I’d rather have been in the know.

And if I got “cool Mum status” along the way? I guess that wasn’t so bad either.