Born With One Strike

A neighbor of mine was shaking her head about the kids she sees daily at her job. She works at a field house that’s part of the Chicago Park District system. It’s one of the newer field houses, a nice facility that unfortunately, doesn’t offer much besides basketball and a fitness room. The people who live around the field house pushed to have it built, complaining that the kids nearby didn’t have a place where they could do some positive hanging out. Now that it’s up and running, it appears that the kids who do come in are causing problems.

“You can look in their eyes and tell that something is wrong with them,” my neighbor said. “Their mamas were doing drugs while they were pregnant with ‘em, and the kids were born with their brains messed up.” That’s something I often forget when the subject of hard-headed, unruly and out-of-control kids comes up. Many of them came out of the womb like that.

Whenever I hear some numbnut talking about legalizing drugs, I wonder if they also have a plan for society to deal with the kids of the drug addicts. The fallout that is happening right now, in terms of juvenile crime, out-of-control classrooms, and heavy loads of casework for social services agencies is already overwhelming as it is. It’s getting worse as the months and years go by. Some kids just can’t be reached because they’ve already got the effects of weed, pills, etc. in their systems telling them to do as much damn damage as they can. Very few of them, if any of them, are ever going to out from underneath the drug fog they were born out of, thanks to their clueless, stupid, brain-dead addicts they have for parents.

It’s Commonplace

I heard squealing coming from the direction of the Pastor’s office. He was pleased to give me the annoucement that the wife of the church’s intern had given birth to a son. “That’s why you heard me squealing,” the First Lady said, excitedly. “Oh, the kid came earlier than expected,” I commented, without a trace of the emotion that the Pastor and his wife had in their voices.

Of course, I’m glad that the intern and his wife had a child without any complications. But honesty, I can’t get excited anymore about anyone being born. People always treat it like it’s a miraculous event, when in reality, it is quite commonplace and ordinary. As I write, there are women in maternity wards all around the world, gasping in pain, and perhaps, cursing out their husbands or boyfriends for putting them in that position. “They’re in it for 21 years. God help them,” I thought to myself, as Pastor and First Lady continued to marvel over the news.

“Why Do I Have A Stupid Kid?”

I was reading an email from one of the missionaries my church supports. The missionary told a story about a mom who complained, “Why are other people’s kids smart, and my kid is stupid?” She had often said this in front of her kid.

She’s not the first or last parent to disparage their kids. My parents didn’t have high opinions of my siblings and I, either. I still chafe about the time I overheard Ma tell someone on the phone that she had “three retarded children.” I pointed to my youngest brother, who was born developmentally delayed, and said, “Ken is the only retarded child you have.” Ma briefly interrupted her conversation to slap me. How dare I get angry at yet another one of her insults.

Dad once spit on me because I couldn’t figure out a math problem. I was seven years old at the time. My parents hadn’t been divorced for very long. He was making one of what would be many of rare visits to see his kids. The old man got frustrated because I didn’t add my numbers right and left the apartment in a huff. Moments later, I felt something wet on my arm. Ma was taken aback when she recognized it as mucus.

According to both parents, my late youngest sister was a criminal and a liar in the making. She often lived up to their low opinions of her when she was a kid. My parents had a hard time believing it when she turned into a responsible adult. I have no doubt that Ma was unpleasantly surprised that I made as far as I did. Dad went to his grave still thinking that I was a fuck-up, an opinion he passed on to the two wives he had after he divorced Ma. As for my late youngest brother, neither parent had high hopes for him. However, I have to give Ma some credit because she did put him in special schools.

My older half-sisters fared no better. Dad disrespected them horribly, that is, when he wasn’t out and out claiming they were of no kin to him.

The joke is on them these days, as neither one of my parents can expect any respect from their surviving kids.