Today is my mother's birthday.

There is a law that prohibits me from divulging her age. That law is murder. If I put her age in the newspaper, she'll kill me.

Nonetheless, I want to do something to mark her special day. I thought about writing about what a great mother she was and about the great childhood I had growing up in small-town Georgia. Because all of that is true.

But the more I thought it, the more I realized that she did some things that showed no apparent concern for my health and well-being.

For instance, I never fastened my seat belt until after I graduated from college, long after I had left my mother's home.

In fact, my mother allowed my brother and me to climb all over the back seat, lie in the back window and stretch out on the back seat to take a nap. I can remember riding in the backseat of my grandmother's Buick that had a hole in the floorboard, and no one gave any thought to ever buckling us in.

Likewise, she never made us wear helmets or pads when we rode our bicycles. And she never seemed to care if we rode them right down the middle of our street.

My brother and I often went with my mother when she went to the Piggly Wiggly to buy groceries. Most of the time, she'd let us come inside. But other times, apparently because she didn't want the inevitable fight that comes when you take a child down the cereal aisle, she wouldn't let us come inside.

"Y'all stay in the car," she said. "I'll be right back. Do not get out of this car."

She didn't leave the engine running so we could use the air conditioning on a hot South Georgia afternoon, but she was kind enough to roll the windows down for us.

I was reminded recently of another thing my mother made us do. I was at a friend's house while they were doing some yard work. Their 5-year-old picked up the water hose and took a sip of water.

"Don't do that," his mother said. "That hose is nasty."

My mother apparently didn't care if the hose was nasty or not. We drank out of the hose all the time. In fact, I don't think I ever drank water any other way when I was a child. We didn't drink bottled water because there was no such thing as bottled water.

We drank Coca-Cola and sweet tea in the house. But when we got hot outside from playing baseball or building forts, she let us drink water straight out of the water hose. I'm fortunate I never caught the plague.

I ate whatever she fixed for dinner. Sometimes, in a fit of generosity, she'd ask us what we wanted. But if she didn't and she got a hankering to fix Brussels sprouts, then that's what we ate, without any regard to the damage it could be doing to our young digestive systems.

On the rare occasion, if we had misbehaved badly enough, we'd be sent to bed without dinner. My mother didn't use anti-bacterial anything to clean up, but she used Ivory soap on my mouth a time or two.

If I got in trouble at school or at a friend's house, I got in trouble at home. There were no questions asked. The teachers or the other mothers had complete authority to discipline me. So much for due process of law.

It wasn't just my mother who did these things. My friend Andy's mother was the same way. So were Mrs. Janet and Mrs. Val and Mrs. Ellen. All of neighborhood kids had these mothers who did these diabolical things to us.

I don't want to dwell too much on the negative, though. After all, it's my mother's birthday, and I want her to have fun today and to celebrate her milestone.

But let's face it, it's a miracle we survived.

Mitch Clarke is executive editor of The Times. His column appears Sundays. Read previous columns at gainesvilletimes.com/mitch. Follow him on Twitter @MitchTimes.