I think that if you are a mom in this decade you pretty much feel like everything you’ve accomplished has been in spite of …
In spite of the government stepping in and telling my kid she has “rights” and I am not allowed to (insert any useful parental edict or rule here) and the police with Child Protective Services will step in and arrest me if I so much as breath parental-nessy stuff around my off spring, I somehow managed to discipline them both without ending up in jail.
I had to get creative.
Yes. Child protective services were involed in my home.
Thank you to the teacher who told my daughter that grounding her was considered false imprisonment. That was super helpful in keeping her away from her drug addicted friends. The solution was to send her to a private school five states away. I missed her Junior and Senior years of high school except for visits. Awesome … Expensive, heart wrenching, life alteringly awesome. She’s alive, anyway, and graduated at the top of her class and I? Did not go to jail. But if a parent wants their kid home by eleven pm (there is a county curfew), and wants them to STAY home until school the next day, well? You don’t have a hell of a lot of options once child protective services tells you that that grounding is false imprisonment. The kid would go to jail if caught out after eleven because of a county wide curfew, but … can’t keep her inside the house by any means, not even verbal threats of no allowance and taking away keys to a car she does not own.
One of us was going to end up in jail (curfew violation or false improsinment charges) or dead (drug addicted friends many of who ARE now dead) in that catch-22.
It’s a great time to be a parent in the US of A.
We got through that. She went to college. Mission accomplished, but it wasn’t Mayberry.
I raised both my children to be able to hunt and fish and handle fire arms and defend themselves once I realized that having a good education simply wasn’t sufficient to insure their survival in this decade and the ones to come.
In spite of the commercial nirvana of cell phones, iPads, hideously over priced fashion musts and bombardments of pop culture that glorfy nothing of any substantive value – not naming names or singling out the vapid, useless, repulsive or the self loathing, morally empty icons of today because they are too varied and far too many and why give them any space at all on my blog if I don’t have to … I taught my offspring the basics on how to survive no matter what the world looks like in the future. And surviving, really surviving, depends one being able to get three things: Food, shelter and clothes. How they get those things? I covered every base I could think of from the practical to the bazaar.
I taught them to love people no matter how weird, misguided, or screwed up they are because ultimately we are all screwed up and we should have fun with it as much as humanly possible … together.
Love yourself, first, of course. But make plenty of room for the rest of the misfits.
For some reason my daughter, unwilling to settle down and have kids, feels I require grandchildren and keeps bringing me stray cats instead. I haven’t figured that out yet and probably never will. fortunately? I love cats.
My son brings home fish and takes care of the cats when he’s not off doing boy things.
It’s my life. These are my kids. They seem to be turning out well even though they do everything the hard way.
Did I do a good job raising them in spite of the government and societal miscreants stacked against me? I have no idea. But I did it. They are alive, educated, employed and kind to strangers and friends. That? Will just have to do.
I just finished re-reading Malcolm Gladwell’s, Outliers, a statistical argument that no one is the captain of their own destiny and at the end I realized something profound.
I mean other than Ayn Rand would have demonstrated the concept of individualism in one word: Death.
It’s personal.
I get what he’s arguing, that we are a product of chance circumstances. He can back it up with stats, of course. But the triumph of the individual is in spite of circumstance.
And yet I see now where the communists get their certainty that without the government providing for everything, a few Bill Gates’s will escape from the farm, seize opportunity, work hard and make waythehelltoomuchmoney.
Level the playing field you socialist bastards. God forbid we should have innovators and entrepreneurs.
I’m not going to mock Sting for the naïveté of this song because he said what all of us wished were true, what we could wrap our heads around in our cotton wool, hyper protected youth. What we could not face, was the reality that it wasn’t the Russians. It was humanity and we wished it were as simple as love.
Love isn’t simple.
At the grand age of sixteen I could not imagine a mother being proud of her son or daughter for strapping a bomb to their body and walking into a restaurant in Telaviv, setting it off, thus giving the family $70k from the Dictator of Iraq or Iran and paying off the mortgage. I’m sure some derivative of love was involved somehow in that, but it was more of a rational … like the reasons we give for bingeing on Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream or something. It’s destructive. It’s self gratifying for the family because they can pretend it was religious nirvana or something, but ultimately it was soul destroyingly atavistic.
“I named my son Osama because I want to make him a mujahid. Right now there is war, but he is a child. When he is a young man, there might be war again, and I will prepare him for that war. I will sacrifice my son, and I don’t care if he is my most beloved thing. For all of my six sons, I wanted them to be mujahedeen. If they get killed it is nothing. This world is very short.” ~ Jihad’s Women By LYNSEY ADDARIO Published: October 21, 2001
That’s human nature.
The same can be said of the man who met his, soon to be ex, wife at the door of the bank and shot her in front of the kids. There’s no religion or nationality or legal structure involved in that. Honor killings and other crimes of passion are not honorable. Murder isn’t in the best interest of all parties involved in the transaction. Here on planet earth, as we struggle to believe in the better, kinder side of humanity, a more primitive construct holds us here until we die and it is always at the base of every moment we are mortal.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in a 1975 lecture to the AFL-CIO that “Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat-ax.” It’s not an ideology based on a higher truth, he told them. It can’t be defended by any rational arguments; hence the insanity of all communist regimes in action. Despite being faced with this reality decades ago, however, people are still deceived by the rhetoric.
Maybe the caliphate creeps love their children, too. But. They for certain don’t love ours. And? We’ve seen their version of love in Bali, at the World Trade Center and hanging on the overpasses, down in the wells of Mexico. We know what their goal is so let’s stop pretending we can all just get along. Any group that’s ok with throwing acid on little girls as they walk to school is not based on universal love and peace.
“Are you going to school?”
Then the man pulled Shamsia’s burqa from her head and sprayed her face with burning acid. Scars, jagged and discolored, now spread across Shamsia’s eyelids and most of her left cheek. These days, her vision goes blurry, making it hard for her to read.
~ Afghan Girls, Scarred by Acid, Defy Terror, Embracing School
If we can’t recognize it here at home there’s no way we will see it clearly across the borders and oceans. There’s a word for a species that evolves to the point where it can no longer grasp the concept of danger and deal with it with clarity and lethal accuracy. That word?
Extinction.
This may sound like it’s all over the place to you if you are at the point in your thinking where an enemy must be defined clearly and identified by religion or uniforms. But if you ponder it further, there were always angels in hell and demons in paradise. This struggle is as old as time. We fight this war as individuals. Don’t sit there and hope the Russians\Communists\Taliban\etc love their children, too. That kind of stupidity will get you killed.
I am female. I work. In fact, I worked three jobs at once to pay for college even though my parents had money … a lot of money. My dad was not a big believer in supporting kids after they turned 18 – OR – he had a lot of mistresses to support. You decide. I would like to say I stopped working when my second child was born, but what actually happened was we were transferred to Puerto Rico and, at the time, I was told by both Digital Switch corporation out of Plano, Texas and Hewlett Packard that Puerto Rican men would not work with or for women and even though I was actually over qualified for the positions they had open, they could not hire me. Disappointing, because after six months of trying to be a stay at home mom I was loosing my mind and desperately wanted a job so I could hire a professional to deal with the guppies. I love them, but I needed a manual. I’m an engineer. I mean I am really a computer geeked the hell out engineer. I dropped accounting because it did not adhere to provable formulas. Kids? Do not adhere to provable formulas, but I could not drop them and thus my offspring are the way they are because I? Never acquired child caring, house managing skills.
It’s my life. Don’t judge. They were fed and clothed and I love them.
Whatever.
My point is, I admire the crap out of professional moms. I’ve known many in my lifetime and they have taught me much about managing budgets, child rearing, career moves through connections and entertaining … it’s unbelievable the schedule these people live by and I know I could never do it myself. I can’t cook because I don’t want to cook. Should my husband ever die, I would live on snacks and the occasional fast food foray. That’s how I grew up; with a mom who was chronically depressed (I mentioned the mistresses, yes?) who cooked three times a year and my sisters and I each got a new outfit for each cooking extravaganza. I associate cooking with sadness and new clothes I don’t want, and will never wear again.
I went to several dinner parties thrown by one of my professional mom friends and noted that she had table settings for fifty. I? acquired table settings for one hundred and threw many parties with seventy or more people. I won’t get into the gory details, but one party was held for over fifty during Hurricane Marilyn and the real plates stayed on the rented tables and the real table cloths, weighted down with crystal tassels, did not fly away as the arm bands passed over the covered patios, and the hurricane lanterns did not blow out, and that party is still being talked about today.
But I would rather work eighty hours a week and go to parties thrown by professionals. Because that life these professional moms lead? Is hard work.
Their kids are well turned out, their husbands careers are THEIR careers and they work it as a team. They build a life and a home and a future unlike anything someone like me could ever hope to have. I envy them and I have no desire to be like them, but I respect their work and their drive and their accomplishments just as they look at me as something different and entertaining to visit with for, a change of pace.
Hillary Rosen is a moron and I feel sorry for her. Obama is probably lying if he says he disagrees with Rosen and in fact he clearly doesn’t have much respect for any women of any stripe, and that’s a shame, because no matter what life we live or how we live it, women are valuable, contributing members of this society and we should stand or fall on the work we do and what we contribute regardless of what or how we chose to contribute.
So. While the world is on fire I decided to change jobs and it’s a fairly big change so I am busy as hell closing down shop in one place and reading up on the systems in the new place. It’s going to be a few weeks before I have anything rational to say on anything so, please be patient.
I’ve been skimming the news periodically, but it’s all pretty standard “World is on fire” stuff and we seem to be on schedule for a currency meltdown this summer and the inevitable confrontation with Iran. I’d like to say I’ve been bracing for impact but to be quite honest here is where Glenn Beck and I differ. I don’t believe there is anywhere safe here on earth so I am just hanging out in the surf waiting for the wave to either drown me or to hopefully ride the crazy in safely to shore.
I’m done hiding and running. There’s no point in living a long life if you live it under a rock.
I recommend that you take this chaotic moment in history to reevaluate everything, because this? What’s happening now? Is the change this President promised. Change is a violent, ugly, destructive process. Get ready to run, baby because standing still ain’t gonna work as a strategy in this day and age. To quote Mrs. Obama, “Let’s Move!” Prophetic words and so very apropriate to the times.
I have very few personal axioms, probably because I think attempting to lasso life with rational thought is a fools errand best left to intellectual idiots, but there is one I absolutely stand by and repeat fairly often.
The amount of truth in an article is inversly proportional to the amount of outrage it generates. ~ Me.
As with all axioms it has some holes, but mostly it’s accurate. When you are watching the news or reading the paper, remember it. As you feel you heart tearing and your anger increasing, realize that you are being manipulated by someone else’s words, not the actual facts of what happened.
People underestimate writers all the time.
Don’t.
These things that are happening today, the bad news, the insane behavior … step back and take some time to find your own thoughts, solidify your own beliefs based on reality as you know it. Turn it all off for at least a day and live inside your own existence because most people? Do not.
I think that if you are a mom in this decade you pretty much feel like everything you’ve accomplished has been in spite of …
