I was thinking back on what I said about how mom would have been in real trouble raising kids in a country with no extended family, and that’s probably true. (Though I’ll point out raising kids with no extended family around is a trial of the “I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy” kind. It was nine years before I could go to the bathroom with the door closed. Fortunately the cats had trained me for that.)
And then it occurred to me she might have been okay with that (I’m not sure any of us are more than okay) but she couldn’t raise a kid the way laws are now in the US. I’m sure of this because mom’s biggest thing was to yell at us. She has an operatic voice and she could go on FOREVER. I know for a fact this would have got her in trouble.
I have a friend who is one of the sweetest men alive, but whose method of blowing off steam so he didn’t get too mad at one of his five children was to yell at them at the top of his lungs, usually in the “moral sermon” vein. You know “What did you think was going to happen? Are you an idiot?”
Well, once he did it in the backyard. (I’m going to guess the sermon was about the dog.) A neighbor called the police that he was “abusing” his child – who was then, I think, 17 and as tall or taller than his father.
We’d not have lasted with my mom ten days. When she was mad the entire village could hear it and she said things that the busybodies would hate, like “I swear, I don’t know why I don’t boil you in oil.” (This must be hereditary. If I had a dime for every time I’ve told the kids or cats “Butter, and onions, you’d be much better with butter and onions,” usually while I’m cleaning some mess. Alternate is “I’d cook you, but there are no pots large enough.”)
Keep in mind that, whatever her opinions about my existence, pre-birth, she was the person who spent years of nights awake willing me to take the next breath (asthma, bronchitis and tuberculosis) and that she brought me alive through what was either the last small pox epidemic to sweep Europe (from a strain escaped from a lab in Germany) or an unusually virulent chicken pox (the word in Portuguese is the same for both and no one seems sure) which took 2/3 of my generation in the village (the mortality seems unusually high for chicken pox, and also they didn’t vaccinate my cohort for small pox when we hit school.) Okay, she did it partly through incredibly close-in nursing; partly through folk medicine (everything covered in red, including the lamp shade); and partly by pointing out in no uncertain terms that if I died I wouldn’t get to go to space and by giving me a bit of old clockwork and telling me it had fallen from the Sputnik.
But she yelled a lot and therefore the busy bodies would intervene.
Now, was she a perfect mother? Oh hell no. Particularly not for me. Mom has problems – the reason she decided she should not have children – and I have a temperament that, as she puts it “would rather break than bend.” From about the age of eight on, we had epic fights, sometimes lasting for weeks and pointing dad to draw the Chinese symbol for War (two women under one roof) on the edge of his newspaper.
But what other mother would aid and abet me (and go out with me, and hold the paint bucket) when I had an absolute necessity to go out at night and change the names of newly renamed streets. (Silly? Well, imagine that the cross streets near you had just got renamed Che Guevara and Lenin. See how it was an absolute necessity?) What other mother would get me a weighted umbrella, so when I got into street fights, I could hold it by the end and use the handle like a mace. (Tactical combat umbrella. It was nice. Lost it in one of the moves.) And what other mother would take me to the best deli in town and order me “The Viking” , which was a dish of ice-cream bigger than my head, then sip tea while I ate, with occasional amused comments of “I feel ill just looking.”
What I mean is that I could give you accounts of my childhood that would make you go “Poor thing” and others that would make you go “Oh, wow, I wish I’d had that.” They’re both true. It’s the same childhood.
I suspect my kids have the same thing. I suspect all of us have the same thing.
Yes, I’ve been known to be rash and harsh with the boys, though the only really bad one I can think of is when the school accused Marsh of horrible stuff and it took us almost a month to figure out it was made up out of whole cloth. (And we only finally figured it out because they accused him of stuff on a day he was home sick – I mean, who would expect a group of girls to make up stuff, and the administrators to believe it if there was no proof? Yeah, I know. Okay, we were stupid. We know better now.)
But did I sometimes punish them for things they hadn’t done? Oh, heck yes. I can’t read minds. I’m still fairly sure that the person who drew all over the wall and signed his name to it was Robert, no matter how much he says it was the (then one year old) Marshall. He STILL says it was and that Marshall DEVIOUSLY signed Robert’s name to it. Marshall says he doesn’t remember. Is it possible? Barely. I doubt it, because Marsh was just starting to talk. I don’t think he could write. But his intelligence is visual, and he MIGHT have seen Robert’s signature and remembered the shape.
Did I yell cruel and unusual stuff at them? Oh, heck, yes. I even (gasp) spanked their bottom (mostly while they were still in diapers. After that we could take the computer cord away, though the 10 year old oldest won himself an epic, chase-him-out-of-the-kitchen by smacking his behind twice, because he came in and tried to tell me how to cook. (I wish I were joking. He actually knew nothing back then. And that’s when he started learning because if I was going to be lectured, at least he’d make sense. But not that day. We had a dinner party and I was sooooo late.) Is it cruel spanking someone who can’t think ahead or plan yet? Well, yes. It was also the only thing that stopped older son doing things like melting his crayons on the heater, eating the cat’s food (though I didn’t watch so closely that I’m not SURE he ate a lot of it,) running out the door naked, etc. Our younger son had a different temperament and with him “distract him with something else” worked. BUT for the older one it didn’t. The people who say “never hurt a child, ever, ever, ever” fail to realize that sometimes you hurt them to prevent greater hurt. I don’t know any properly-sane parent who enjoys even the butt-smack. All the great apes spank – and there’s a reason for that. Yes, of course, after the age when they’re more than little monkeys, there are other methods. (I think if consulted Marsh would much rather I’d continued spanking him after three, rather than taking his computer cord away for periods of days or weeks, depending on the severity of the crime, which is what we did from the age of three on.)
But on the whole the boys turned out all right. The cats didn’t, but cats never do. (And they don’t get spanked, either, only bottle sprayed. Which goes to show you.)
What I’m trying to say is that we’ve let so many things fall under the aegis of regulation that there is now this idea that to raise children you must be “perfect” and you must always do things “perfectly.” Because they have these regulations, see? You’re not supposed to spank the kid, even if you have one of those kids who can’t be stopped in any other way. And you’re not supposed to leave them alone — even when your six year old is as mature and clear-thinking as most 18 year olds – not even for two hours. And you’re not supposed—
It has made parenting a strange burden. It makes adopting a child the equivalent of inviting a bureaucrat into your home which is like inviting a vampire but not nearly so pleasant.
And it condemns most unwanted or semi-wanted children to the h*ll of foster care forever, because either more responsible people don’t dare adopting, or they get moved out of the foster home they start getting attached to, due to something stupid.
Like all the other regulations, these get applied according to someone’s idea of “perfect” so that someone who is considered “perfect” by race or culture or whatever for the child gets a pass or not watched at all; meanwhile someone middle class (because all our movies have taught us that’s a pool of inequity) gets watched very closely indeed and can have the kids pulled away on stupid stuff. Meanwhile, there is the Rousseauvian idea of the “perfect” vitiating the cycle and mandating that kids stay even with markedly dangerous natural parents rather than saner adoptive parents. Because that’s “natural” and therefore “better.” (Contemplates the fact that this very morning she saw an ad for “organic cotton sheets” and wondered if they were supposed to be eaten.)
There is a tendency when writing rules and regulations to think of what would be “perfect” –No child shall ever be spanked! No child will ever have to eat something he doesn’t like! No child shall ever hear harsh words!
What people tend to forget is the old saw “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” If you concentrate on making things absolutely perfect, this being an imperfect world, it will just put the onus elsewhere.
The onus is now on parents, both real and adopted, and a great part of the reason we’re failing to produce the next generation is that we’re afraid of the bureaucrat and his clipboard. We’re also contemplating not having a life till the younger kid is ten or so and no one can blame us for leaving them alone for more than 2 hours. (I mean, a friend and I started a writers’ group that allowed you to bring kids to it, because we couldn’t afford the – then six dollars an hour – babysitter for the meeting or the coffee klatch this group considered mandatory afterwards. We couldn’t afford $50 per week for a writers’ meeting. BUT if our husbands hadn’t been okay with having the house invaded on alternate weeks, we’d have been stuck.) We’re contemplating child-proofing the house, and/or being brought up on child neglect if we don’t and the kid has to go to the hospital. And if you’re the parent of normal boys, you’re contemplating being treated like a criminal whenever you have to take him to emergency. (Marshall. Dancing in socks on the edge of the bathtub. TWO MINUTES. I was vacuuming the floor.)
What I mean is that raising children (and many other things in life) are the sort of unpredictable endeavor no one can be perfect at. My mom had reasons for her imperfections, but she fought them too, and all I can say is that compared to her childhood, mine was a dream come true. And hers was considerably better than her father’s. And sometimes that’s ALL you can aim for.
But laws and rules and bureaucracy don’t recognize that. They want us to be PERFECT and that’s why the more they invade places in life where the light and dark twine, the more IMperfect – and often downright hellish – things become.
Because the law deals with black and white, and life isn’t.
Pardon the scattered post, for reasons unknown to me I was awake from 3 am to 5 am. Dan was too. I put it to good use (!) and edited another chunk of Musketeer’s seamstress. I’m going off my last page-proof copy and let me tell you, I’ve compared, these people introduced more errors than they removed. (Though they got the punctuation, which is why I’m going off that.) Why didn’t any of you who’ve read these tell me how bad they were? One example: they turned all the sought into thought – which means several sentences become word salad.
On purpose? Probably not. But honestly, I’m surprised at still getting fan mail on these, as many sentences as I get to and go “uh?” I guess the “book preparation services” for the NY publishers are up there with “layers and layers of fact checkers” for the media.
The only reason I can imagine for the wakefulness was a phone call from mom yesterday, and her conviction Portugal is headed to bankruptcy or collapse. It truly doesn’t help being this far away. And I wish we were in a more stable position (and economy) that I could tell them to just come here if things get too bad.
I finally fell asleep after five am, and I dreamed I was interviewing to teach languages at a huge private school, only the interview was at three am, and the boys and Dan had gone to see a movie called Father Malachi’s Baby (!) and I had to walk home (can’t drive at night) all alone. Fortunately one of the students at the school lent me her GPS.
My take on this is that it was (clearly) a school for the undead. I have nothing on the movie. If I’m now invoking horror movies that never existed, there is no hope.
Anyway, as you can imagine this left me a little uh-ish.
According To Hoyt 
“…a great part of the reason we’re failing to produce the next generation is that we’re afraid of the bureaucrat and his clipboard…”
I keep hearing this but I’ve never actually met anybody who said that the bureaucrat and clipboard kept them from having children. At the margin it might have some effect, but it seems to me that contraceptives and abortion are by far the greater factor. Or do you think the bureaucrat and the clipboard would also keep people from having sex?
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No. I’m not denying the effect of contraceptives and abortion, but I can tell you that people do things like limit to two because they want to be able to go shopping during the day without the kids. I don’t know if you were ever the primary caretaker, but even though I wanted more kids, I was aware it would cost me the ability to live my life even half normally for years. And before you ask, no not every parent had this. My mom left me at home at six (at six you’re usually not stupid enough to set fire to yourself. Or you shouldn’t be) or let me go play with neighbor friends for the day, or roam the neighborhood — and she could go shopping or clean the house, or whatever needed doing. The ONLY respite I had was when the kids went to school. (And part of the reason the younger went to kindergarten at all.) IF you don’t think that influences the use of contraceptives and abortion, you need to show work, not me.
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I have 4, and the first three were 18 months apart. It was a very difficult time, being pregnant, breastfeeding, and fatigue… then when my son came along just when I’d gotten the last girl out of diapers, I didn’t think I’d make it. There were a lot of factors involved, not just the kids, but it was tough, and I had no support. To this day my closest elder-relative tells me I have too many children. Not sure what she expects me to do about it!
With kids, you give up your life. A lot of the overgrown adolescents who have them don’t realize this, and can’t handle it. That’s why there are so many horror stories now, I suspect.
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And bureaucracy piling expectations on top of a “good enough” job doesn’t help.
I thought they were going to take Robert away from me when I was an hour late picking him up from kindergarten (I was writing, and… well… I SHOULDN’T have been, but they SHOULD have called earlier.) Anyway, he was crying and saying I’d decided to abandon him (well, he read 19th century books. He read everything) and they apparently thought this meant I’d told him I intended to. I came in to find him surrounded by interrogators wanting to know WHY he thought this…
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Don’t feel bad. You once left it to me to pick up Robert at the Manitou swim club after his lessons, that was… don’t know what age, the youngest he could take the class. Something told me I should be there ABSOLUTELY ON TIME, but I stopped to get gas, or straightened up one last thing at work, or some such, and I was at mosst ten minutes late. I found yeah, abandoned little one from a nineteenth-century children’s novel, weeping his heart out. And I’m sure he meant it, really felt abandoned, I think it was the state of the world at the time he was hearing about and taking it all very seriously.
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Maybe a BIT later, I don’t remember any other kids there. Fortunately, the young man in charge was both very sympathetic to Robert, and lacking any PC impulses, when I arrived, the whole thing was solved and over.
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Yes, I felt HORRIBLE.
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You monster!
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I’ve done that TWICE picking up Timmy from school. His teacher makes him sit right outside the outside door until I arrive. Luckily both days I forgot were rather nice weather-wise. I was never more than five minutes late, but still…
Yeah, you feel like a total louse.
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Next time she says you have to many tell her your only choice at this point would be to eat one, but only if she has a good recipe.
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I have too many kids? Who do you think is going to pay for your Social Security and Obamacare?
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This idea that there is some shortage of good recipes for cooking up misbehaved children is very much a myth. There are all sorts of good recipes – many can be traced back to Grimm’s Fairy Tales but much recent work in developing a good veal “long pig” cuisine has been done. I expect to be putting out a Paleo diet inspired cookbook soon.
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Yes, but most of those start with first building a gingerbread house and who has the money for that?
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A low-carb gingerbread house.
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the price of sugar has gone UP
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And I’m willing to bet sugar substitutes just don’t work as well. I’ve tried baking with Splenda and I don’t care what they say it doesn’t taste the same to me. Wasting a batch of cookies is one thing, who could afford to waste a batch of kids?
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spewing coffee out my nose and nodding in agreement at the same time
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I’m gonna be in soooo much trouble when Sarah returns to this blog.
See ya later, I got to go hide.
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You know… pensively… we’ll be in Denver tomorrow….
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Then I better hide good.
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The heck with the price of sugar — haven’t any of you people looked at the building codes for gingerbread??!!!
Special wiring, special plumbing, reinforced joists and if you live in an area prone to hurricanes and/or tornadoes the restrictions go right through the roof (and a very tasty roof it will be.)
There are also expensive insurance riders for maintaining an attractive nuisance (funny, those aren’t required for the attractive redhead down the lane who likes to sunbathe topless at her grandmother’s house, getting all the wolves for miles around all worked up!)
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Don’t forget the permits for building in the woods. Plus the filing an environmental impact statement. And don’t even think about building in a National Forest.
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BTW is the redhead down the lane the real backstory of Little Red Riding Hood?
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*reads thread, considers commenting, flees*
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Was going to comment on the redhead…but on second thought…I’ll just keep my mouth shut and slip out without turning my back.
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Eric Berne noted that his psych patients presenting with a red hoodie all had.. erm… grandfather issues. Who else would you expect to find in gramma’s bed?
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This would be funny. She wouldn’t get it, but I’d be amused.
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I suggest you forget this conversation when next it comes up then. I find busting out laughing in their face tends to not improve things. :) Well I always feel better but generally they don’t.
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“IF you don’t think that influences the use of contraceptives and abortion, you need to show work, not me.”
As I said, at the margin, it may have an effect. But consider the following. The pill was first FDA approved in 1957. In the two decades following the introduction of the pill, births per 1000 dropped from about 25 to 15 and has held steady ever since. Between 1957 and 1977 a parent could still leave a mature 6 year old unattended in most places without anyone much worrying about it. The bureaucracy your referring to has increased mostly after 1977 and the birth rate in the U.S. has held constant since 1977.
Ref: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005067.html
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Perhaps it was the availability that fueled the bureaucrats that resulted in the decline.
Once you decide that children are optional, you decide that anyone who has one has to do it perfectly, since they could have gone without.
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Problem, notice what the first note says:
. Figures through 1959 include adjustment for under-registration; beginning 1960, figures represent number registered. For comparison, the 1959 registered count was 4,245,000
So right at the place you’re identifying a sea-change, they’re changing the measurements.
Looking for the source, the DHHS says that it doesn’t have stats on all births and sends you to the CDC.
If you do accept the stats as being fairly accurate, there’s also the massive population disruption of WWII and the Boomers, and then the steady increase in age of mother at first birth, and the questionable statistic of using of doing a per 1000 population rather than the fertility rate. (women of childbearing age)
Increase in divorce would factor in as well.
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Unless we are both half drunk and I trust you a lot– little redundant, there– I’m not going to talk about the gut-deep fear of someone taking my kids. I’ll vouch that it exists, and that it’s a big weight when considering if you’ll have one more kid (due to supervision requirements) but I’m sure not going to volunteer that usually.
Folks seldom talk about things that really, really scare them. Speak of the devil and you see his horns.
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I share that. Especially since my divorce. As a single mother of four (it was years before he gave us any support, although now he’s doing fine) I felt like I had a target painted on me.
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Contraceptives and abortion enabled the limiting of family size. But they weren’t the _reason_.
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Exactly.
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Women (at least in the US) were being taught that they wanted less (children) and more (of everything else.) Some of these women who bought the new paradigm are finding out that they feel empty and unfulfilled.
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And probably the most pernicious is the attitude of, “I don’t want to bring a child into a world as screwed up as this.”
What did they think it was like before the latter half of the 20th century? I see even otherwise completely rational people saying this.
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Yea– I have been hearing that gem since the 1980s.
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Mom things that wouldn’t be allowed. I got the moral sermon. My mother was and remains famous for her ability to lecture at length on any subject and task you with your resentful attitude for having to suffer through it at the same time.
One time when I was a sophomore or a junior in HS, a bunch of rowdy friends brought me home (drunk) from a party one Sunday morning at 1 or 2 in the AM and she met us at the front door with her Colt Commander in hand at her side. The friends (mostly hippie wannabes) gasped “Does she have a GUN?” I was used to it and sort of shrugged it off, but they took off running back up the street.
But she also was the one who read me the Just So Stories, the Jungle Books, and the Pooh books, doing character voices that put Disney to shame. (Yes, better than Sterling Holloway.)
And, when I was sick with mumps or chicken pox or whatever it was that time, when I awoke from fevered dreams with a whimpered “Mom?” she was RIGHT. THERE.
Yesterday was her birthday. Happy birthday, Mom!
When Aldous Huxley describe state creches in Brave New World, he meant it as a cautionary tale, not a how-to manual.
Idiots. There really ought to be an open season on these morally lackwitted busybodies. No tags required. No bag limit. Maybe even a small, nominal bounty — perhaps enough to cover the cost of ammunition.
Bleah!
M
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Happy birthday to your mom–
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Happy Birthday to Mark’s Mom :)
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“…and she met us at the front door with her Colt Commander in hand at her”
That’s awesome.
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In general, I love Disney, but I find it hard to forgive them for the way they sucked all the subtle out of Pooh and The Jungle Books, particularly The Jungle Books because my favorite character was Kaa.
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Disney did the Jungle Books? Don’t exist. [Very Big Evil Grin]
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The Jungle Book was a very good movie. Absolutely no relation to the book by Rudyard Kipling, of course.
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What did you think of Disney’s sequel? [Wink]
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Hmm . . . oddly enough, I don’t remember the sequel. ;-)
And I mean it that it had nothing to do with the book. Walt gave strict orders that the story people, artists, and song writers (the wonderful Sherman brothers) not read the book until after they finished the movie.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle_Book_2
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I liked the Disney songs for their version, but Kipling’s book was much much much better (language and story).
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The hardest I’ve ever laughed at a concert was when the King’s Singers did “Kaa’s Lullaby.” One of the basses had a really bad snake sock puppet that harassed one of the tenors and tried to sing along.
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LOL– NICE ;-)
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Disney’s Jungle Book compares to Kipling’s in much the same way that the movie version of Starship Troopers compares to Heinlein’s book.
Except for the “good” part.
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Watch Roughnecks you’ll feel a little better.
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Everything about Kipling is in the language, which he used marvelously. “Cry thy trail, little brother.” “‘Son, son,’ she said, ever-so-many-time-gently waving her tail.” “Yonder man-o-war with the armor-plated upper deck shall vitiate your future career.” “The great, gray, green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees.” “Up jumped Dingo, yellow dog Dingo, grinning like a coal-scuttle.”
And Disney, as you say, sucked that all out of it when they went visual on it.
M
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Lots of things at disney suck.
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Which is why the current Disney and George Lucas SO deserve each other…..
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I was a junior in HS and had just returned from my first all night long outing. I went to bed. Exactly 30 minutes later, my mom woke me up to say, “You promised to mow the lawn this morning, so get busy.” So I pushed the manual lawn mower until the grass was cut. In the future I made sure I didn’t have any promises to keep before I stayed out late.
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I never had the guts to show up drunk, I knew the resulting scene wouldn’t be pretty. Interestingly enough, the one time I got busted for drinking (on school field trip, yes I was that stupid) I don’t recall being punished.
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My mom, who didn’t attend college, didn’t get the difference between “study party” and “party” and I could NEVER break her of the habit of vacuuming outside my room at five am on nights I’d come home at three after a cramming session. She insisted on seeing my CRABBY behavior as evidence of my being hungover, too. In fact, I was just short on sleep. It got to me so much, I started sleeping overnight at my friend’s apartment across from the campus. THEN she thought we were having sex parties.
In fact, my life was extremely boring and even if I’d have a local boyfriend, I wouldn’t have the energy to do anything — I was working half time, taking over the recommended credits, and taking language courses on the side — and the only times I got drunk was when my father and/or brother overestimated my capacity.
I wish my mom hadn’t read the sort of lurid lifestyle sections that told her what co-eds did in their free time. I didn’t have any free time.
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Take the “guilty until proven innocent” standard that was applied to your son in school… combine it with this bureaucratic standard of perfection you describe here… add to it the “have it all” attitude that is bred into women today… and tell me what possible incentive your sons have to even try to perpetuate the species by starting a family of their own.
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I have this argument with the boys all the time… I’d still like grandkids…
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Ah, wait until they’re out of college, and no longer forced to associate with idiots due to core class restrictions. The vast majority of people self-select when allowed to (Odds being no exception), and when the women you meet at the range, on a whitewater rafting trip, scrutinizing the rebuild on a WWII ambulance at a re-enactment, and at the right (leaning) con parties are much more interesting, fascinating, and practical than the vapid ivory-tower-led idiots they’re currently around, they’ll change their minds.
Mind you, were I interested in grandchildren, I might start encouraging then to look in interesting places for interesting women now, so they don’t have to try to keep up with a 5-year-old when they’re 35, but that’s me.
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Robert is determined that if he dates “for reals” it will be when he can marry within a year or two, so depending on whether med school comes about or not, the 35 might be inevitable. Also, our family ALWAYS reproduces late (if at all.)
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If they can hang one long enough (I have three brothers who waited till they were in their 30s to get married), they will eventually find at least one woman who is a fit and is not a looney– I hope.
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Having taste in women is a good start.
Trust me, the guys who have decided that being the worst caricature of a feminist is how to get ahead are no prize, either; ditto the 30+ year old boys that want a mommy who will also give them strings-free sex.
There’s always been a lack of suitable partners, especially when you start blaming everyone who happens to share their genetic organization for a few of the more loud, obnoxious twits.
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I haven’t had such a bad night for a long time– My dream: I was wrestling with a demon and keeping its fangs away from my neck. We rolled down the hallway and I kept banging its head on the floor. I keep grabbing iron and steel implements and kept stuffing it into it. I woke up just as someone came to help me.
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It was a really bad night here too. I haven’t checked the news yet…
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An explosion at a fertilizer plant in West Texas near Dallas. The place was leveled and a lot of people were hurt. I haven’t heard the statistics yet and don’t know how many dead.
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yeah — I knew about that. Friends near there.
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We have friends near Dallas– but not close enough to experience this–
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was thinking of taking a ride out that way this weekend, The Czech bakery I was gonna visit was said to have lost all the windows. I guess I shall have to wait and go help the local economy later. Sad day. West is a very small community, so it is going to be hit very hard by this.
Texas has had some bad luck with fertilizer over the years.
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When I first heard about an ammunition plant exploding, I was afraid it was the one in Acme, Texas, on US287. That place is MONSTROUS. They make three or four types of fertilizer from raw stock, so an explosion there would be heard HERE. As folks have said, West is a small town, so the explosion will affect everyone there. Prayers will help.
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Even if one is not a religious person, prayers don’t hurt. And I’ve never even had an atheist decline my offer to pray for them during bad times.
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My thoughts and prayers have been to the people in West TX since I heard last night.
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I used to live near Dallas. Hedrick, to be exact. I really liked it there, and Hedrick had a fantastic school. I don’t know anyone from there anymore, but I pray for them.
We were in the mall near the Fort Worth airport when the plane crashed in ’84. Mom was looking at china plates– then there was the shaking, and the crystal punch bowl I was looking at tipped and crashed on the floor. I thought it was my fault until all the plates behind me also crashed on the floor, and men in black jumpsuits escorted us (and everyone else) out of the building.
Mom had to dodge through roadblocks to get us home. We didn’t want to take the beltway *all the way around the city* to get home. Of course the police and secret service let her through– my little brother was crying at full volume, as only a toddler can. I’m sure they heard us coming. No one wanted to deal with that child. :)
We didn’t even know what was happening until we got home and saw the news. All we saw was billowing smoke from the airport behind the mall.
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Shoot. Pay me to proof your stuff and you’ll get it back in perfect condition, and fast, too. You know how to reach me.
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I offered to proof for a friend who does seminars on customer service. The last book was “proofed” by a *professional* at a university.
It, had, on average, more commas, and, other punctuation marks, than a grammar book; not, to mention, being largely unreadable: unless, of course, you ignored the punctuation. I couldn’t. And I never finished reading the copy he gave me.
I offered to proof for FREE, just to get him to avoid the hazard.
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” … pointing out in no uncertain terms that if I died I wouldn’t get to go to space and by giving me a bit of old clockwork and telling me it had fallen from the Sputnik.”
This is quite beautiful, actually.
As to spanking … I had to stop spanking when my son, at age 4, put one of those old-fashioned wooden building blocks into the back of his pants while I was in the kitchen getting the wooden spoon … and when I spanked and the wooden spoon broke … well, everyone was rofl …
And then there’s the time both my kids had foot-and-mouth at the same time and were in so much untreatable pain … and my husband was away on business … and eventually I noticed the neighbor watching as I shrieked in utter helpless frustration at the utterly helpless children in pain … yeah … solution was close all the doors and windows to contain the “evidence” and that is exactly how I thought of that situation, how sad is that … no neighbor offered to spell me for an hour or two … that is one evil if essentially harmless disease.
I have been thinking for the last couple of years much of what you express, Sarah. I was a really “bad mother” in so many ways, but I was doing the best I could. Our family has faced so many heavy crosses; I think knowing how much harder we have it than the “perfect American family” has made me more accepting of everyone’s imperfections, even those of mothers. And I think about my mother and her deficiencies and the things she was wrestling with at the same time as raising children … and I have so much more compassion and/or sympathy than I did 20 years ago … there is no perfection, ref. book of Genesis.
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We stopped spanking when “taking computer cord away” was more effective.
BTW one of those “OMG, shame” moments was when Marshall got pinkeye — I still have no clue how, except really poor kiddie hygiene (on his part) and overlong hair. The hair was overlong because we had ONE car and I hadn’t been able to drive Dan in/pick him up (don’t remember why. I think snow) so he’d been driving the one car, and he was working 16 hour days, weekends included, on some project for MCI (at the time.) So, barring my cutting the kids’ hair (and I’m not that good) it wasn’t happening.
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Oh gawd, I would have “beat the brat bloody” if it had done any good. In Daughtorial Unit’s case it just increased the subjects being argued about.
With an Odd child nothing, nothing works so well as induced boredom. I have lectured until my throat was raw solely for the purpose of boring the child sufficiently to instill deep-seated avoidance. Until you’ve attempted it you can have no idea how tedious it can be to be boring.
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I guess this is normal I don’t remember being too out of hamd. Though this one time I nicked a friends toy I got spanked and had to write lines. saying I would not steal. not that difficult. I was the socially awkward of my sister and I. though I learned stealing was wrong. oh yes I did.
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I stole the equivalent of a penny off my mom at 3 or 4. She called the village police (I think she probably offered him a slice of cake.) He came in and made it really convincing, interrogation and all and telling me he’d hate to have to lock me up.
I never stole again.
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That would scrape the ever living crap out of me. As it is my boss tells me off some months back and almost cried because they looked at me crosswise.
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Tried lecturing the child (actually both the oldest and the youngest) to boredom, but they figured out quickly how to derail me. Discussions of Byzantine history, or nematodes, or intertidal arthropods, or cloud classification and weather system analysis, or stall aerodynamics …
They developed some curious interests as they grew up.
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As a kid, it took awhile but my parents learned that making me sit on the front porch w/o a book for entertainment (yes, kiddies during the Jurassic era when I grew up we did not have console video games, or home computers … thrrppppt ).
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Didn’t work for me. I just went into my own mind… made my own stories. Yes. I was a horrible child.
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Umm– as a child (between 3-5 can’t remember earlier) when I was being punished, my father (mother couldn’t control me, lol) would put me in my room, wave his finger, and leave me there. I would scream for hours and hours and hours and hours until I fell asleep. My parents had bought into the “don’t teach your children to learn how to read– the school can do it better.” So no reading– I did think up stories– After that my parents tried spankings, and they did work until I hit puberty— (the last time I was hit was when I was twenty)… I was walking out of the house with the clothes on my back when my father apologized. My relationship with him has suffered badly– I only recently started to talk to him again and he is in his 80s. My mother denies that any of this happened. We rarely talk.
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My parents would take away my star wars books. Grr. But I kept a book in my bag and read on the bus. Small stuff compared to some I wager.
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My parents made me go pull weeds. I got really, really good at gardening there for a while.
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I have heard of one family that had a load of rocks delivered to the back yard. Its sole purpose was so a kid in need of negative reinforcement could move the pile from the North side of the yard to the South side, and from the East end to the West.
Although these days, with MP3 players and audiobooks it doesn’t seem very onerous.
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My biggest “sin” was disappearing at daybreak and not returning until after dark — sometimes LONG after dark. That started when I was about 5, and continued until I was twelve or so (I still did it, but neither parent was aware of it. I was responsible for my baby brother [five years younger than I], and frequently a half-dozen of my cousins and their friends.). We lived in a rural enough environment that I could do that. The only thing that would keep me at home was a new book to read. We didn’t have television until I was 8 or 9, and even then it was usually pretty boring. Exploring the neighborhood was far more fun.
Sarah — I had something when I was 14 months old that was probably smallpox, but was diagnosed as COW pox (in California, 1947 or so — didn’t want smallpox in the statistics). I’ve had more than 30 smallpox inoculations, and none of them have taken. I’ve got a couple of scars from it to this day.
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I have one scar — on my upper lip, not visible with makeup — yay — and a bunch on my belly. I remember mom and Grandma being very afraid I’d be disfigured.
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It makes sense. Even today the smallpox vaccine is derived from cowpox.
Interesting fact: Jefferson instructed the Lewis and Clark expedition to carry smallpox vaccine with them to inoculate the natives. So much for the genocidal white man.
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Excuse me? And smallpox was invented when?
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Fun with search engines:
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I stand corrected. Apologies extended.
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It gets better — do any of you know *how* “inoculation” was done in those days? Find someone with cowpox; stick a knifepoint or needle into one of the blisters; then stick the same tip into the person needing the inoculation. 1/1000 of the time, the person would catch smallpox; the rest of the time, nothing.
Interesting side note: When the Colonies invaded Canada in 1775, one of the subordinate generals insisted on having the troops inoculated, but was shot down by higher command due to the “disgusting” nature of inoculation. Most of the Colonial invasion was wiped out by — you guessed it — smallpox; had the troops been inoculated, very likely Canada as we know it would not exist (and what would this have done to the British Empire?).
The name of this general who no one was willing to listen to?
Benedict Arnold.
It was incidents like this — his being ignored, and later proven correct — which eventually led to his changing sides. Just goes to show….
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I remember reading something about Spanish galleons carrying kittens infected with cowpox to inoculate all the sailors, then taking them to wherever they went to inoculate everyone– including the Natives. There were bastards and honestly good people everywhere– it’s just so much easier to remember the bastards and the slights and not the people trying to help.
I knew a fellow who was thought to be one of the last people to have had small-pox- he had scars all over his face. Too bad, he was a handsome man. He was a monk, so I guess looks weren’t as useful for him. Oddly, he taught intro-calculus at our Elementary school in NM. Rocket Scientists sent their kids there… so our topics were a bit advanced. That school only went up to the sixth grade.
I was the last child to be corporally punished in our school. They waited to read the cease and desist order until after I had my walk of shame back to the classroom. They read it out loud as I was walking back– but I didn’t really understand until all the kids were shouting about it.
Mostly I got spanked because I didn’t turn in those boring homework assignments that were mostly busy work anyway. I was too gifted (learning disabled, whatever) to take any of the interesting classes, so I mostly taught myself in the library. I used to skip class in favor of reading the science books and history books there, because they weren’t lacy embroidery substituted for knowledge. The librarian loved me, so tended to cover up my crimes. Not sure how she kept her job.
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Smallpox wasn’t invented, it evolved. Probably after the cow was domesticated. So, 6000 years ago, give or take a millennium.
As for the vaccine, that was around the turn of the 19th century, though the use of mild smallpox to prevent more severe cases had been working its way west from China since the 16th century. That arrived in Europe and the North American colonies around 1720.
It was the cowpox vaccine that the Corps of Discovery took with them.
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You know, one thing I’ve been worried about lately is for that mutation to happen again. It’s pretty likely that smallpox evolved from cowpox.
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I don’t think it’s that likely, we don’t live in nearly the same proximity to our livestock that we did millennia ago. The virus would have to mutate, get past modern hygiene practices, and find a farmer who hadn’t already garnered immunity from cowpox exposure. Plus I’m sure it would require multiple mutations. I think the original smallpox evolved in humans from cowpox that had started being passed around without cows.
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As I understand it, this kind of thing happens mostly in the process of moving from one species to another. As in: instead of mutating before it crosses to the human, it mutates because it got into the human, and changes to a form that is more compatible.
Given the virulence of swine and avian flus, I would suggest it’s possible that the cowpox virus originally crossed to one of them, THEN crossed into humans to become smallpox. Or possibly some combination thereof. And, while we are not so close to our livestock here in this country, and in most of Europe, in Asia and India there is still a lot of close contact with livestock.
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Could be. Viruses don’t replicate cleanly, they sometimes grab chunks of host DNA on their way out. But even in the third world there is better human-animal hygiene than existed in the first few thousand years of animal husbandry. I don’t think many places in the world still use large animals as domestic heating sources. And any virulent disease outbreak would be noticed relatively quickly and health officials would be able to take effective, if possibly drastic, action.
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My mom used to send us kids after our own switch. A mesquite switch. Think willow, with thorns.
But we honored our mother. And she, rest her soul, never gave up on the worst of us.
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My mother killed the peach tree we had in the back yard by cutting switches from it to use on me and my younger brother. Yeah, she frequently made us get our own. The real problem was, it didn’t really change our behavior.
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Same here. It did ‘modify’ it for a while, though. We were little hellions. Funny, so were my kids ….
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Our paternal grandmother, who raised the three of us after our mother died, also resorted to the peach tree sucker at need.
We were quick to adjust just how far we’d push her… Oddly enough, the peach and apricot trees didn’t seem to care. The plum was so pathetic that it was mostly ignored; I think we got one crop one year in the 12 years we lived there, but it was a doozy. Then nothing again from it, ever.
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The Colonel — my stepfather — had a Tandy belt blank — a strip of cowhide, no stain or dye, no tooling, and no hardware — which he labeled “Psychology.” And whenever one of us kids got out of line, we got a little applied Psychology.
M
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I’ve seen many a wooden paddle labeled, “Board of Education”.
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It is a well-demonstrated scientific fact that stimulating the gluteus maximus increases blood flow to the brain.
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To be applied to the Seat of Knowledge. [Wink]
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My grandmother had a razor strop hanging beside her sewing machine, she would send the grandkids to get it whenever it was needed. I always recall my dad and some of his brothers talking about how when they were kids one of them stole it and hid it. She lined them all up and used a belt to give them lickings, after the second day of that the strop mysteriously reappeared.
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“Tactical combat umbrella”
http://real-self-defense.com/unbreakable-umbrella/
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Mine had a round grip. It was an awesome mace.
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Ah. You held it by the “pointy” end and hit with the handle.
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I’m looking for the Swiss Army Brolly. Along with all the expected appurtenances the handle sheathes a long thin knife, the pommel a round silver ball with lead center.
Next time I see Mad Mike I may be looking to talk commissioned product.
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Take a look at these, Sarah reminded me of the brass knuckle umbrella.
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That’s the reason I keep an axehandle near my bed at night. Any burglar gets it, right at eye level, swung like a baseball bat. Jean throws cats.
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Jean is a war criminal – that’s banned in the Hague Convention.
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YOU tell her. Remember, we live in the Springs, not that far from Sarah. I have friends on several police forces in the Denver metro area… No threat intended, of course. 8^)
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I throw bits of lead. 230 grains at 900 fps from my 1911
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Speaking of lead…
Caught part of this week’s ‘Lost Girl’ because roomates were watching it while i was trying to do some work on the review machine. This week’s big bad was vulnerable to lead. The person facing off with it was a cop. But she still opened her shirt so show off her vest o’ bladey-things underneath…. why not just SHOOT it, jeez.
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That, nor the sword/knife brollys are legal to possess out here in the west. (Three guesses where, and the first two don’t count.)
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Heh. My childhood would never have been allowed to happen in the current environment. Case in point: my father was just a *tad* accident-prone. Fell off our roof multiple times (good thing Mom planted sturdy shrubs), his wood lathe came apart and smacked him in the head, and he nearly scalped himself on a freshly pruned tree branch (which he had just pruned himself, too). I lost count of how many times Mom would show up looking harassed (my blood-soaked father considerately out of view), saying “please look after your little sister, Daddy needs to go to the doctor”. I think I was at most seven. See, she KNEW I was trustworthy and had an aversion to pain, so I would never pull the stunts my Dad did and could be safely left to my own devices for a few hours. (None of these events did permanent damage, amazingly enough. Dad was built sturdy.) Plus we had a huge German Shepard that would have eviscerated anyone breaking in the house (guests were merely slobbered on with love, but she *looked* like death on wheels. We had no problems with religious doorknockers, strangely enough…)
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I strongly agree with this article. I will mention something about family: One of the big enlightenment that marriage gives people is a real true understanding that other people have family issues too. Even though teens complain to each other about their families, it isn’t real until we add a new family to ours. It’s especially neat when their issues are sometimes opposite of ours. (for instance how they treat holidays).
Also, I wouldn’t invest in some bright young genius’s idea – if that bright young genius had always succeeded in everything. Things happen – and being able to move on past mistakes is important.
These are side issues to the “perfect is the enemy of good” concept, but important parts of understanding life.
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“Things happen – and being able to move on past mistakes is important.”
Like your demagoguery on gun control failing miserably?
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It’s sad how many activists and others say “since society/ this park/religion/whatever is not perfect, we need to destroy it and build a new one” or “call CPS because mom swatted her toddler twice on the rump” instead of “since the world is not perfect, how can we improve what is not so good and help people who might need a hand.”
Yeah, my parents would have had CPS called on them for neglect and endangerment, as would the parents of all but one kid I grew up with. That one was so over protected and sheltered in all the wrong ways that he had massive problems (he’d skipped two grades, so he was a 13 year-old freshman, pre-puberty, wore a parka every where even in August and May, loathed girls) even before we all hit high school.
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All here; Please, please, please tell me you have checked out http://www.freerangekids.com
I don’t have kids myself, and probably never will, but just knowing that there is some intelligent pushback going on gives me hope.
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Mine are now 21 and 18 which is why I can admit in public that I did swat them. I mean, they can’t take them away.
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Heck, they are reaching the age where “taking them away” is a boon ;-)
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Sarah I had one (your namesake, at that) who had to be tied into bed as a toddler, or she’d be out the bedroom door before we were. She’s expecting her first – and I’m awaiting my revenge! Bwahaha!
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oh, yah, we had one we had to reverse the doorknob so we could lock her INTO her room … she hasn’t really changed in her teens … sigh …
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Yeah, we also had one (a different one) that climbed out her window to meet a boy I disapproved of.
It eventually worked out: they were engaged for 5 years during his college, and they’ve been married five years, with a perfectly beautiful daughter. Who eventually, I’ve no doubt, will give her mom headaches as well.
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I SO wish I had had children like me, instead of the wildmen I wound up with.
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You’re right Sarah. Things have reached insanity. I remember the day my oldest daughter was born. She was about five or six hours old and she was scratching herself to pieces. We couldn’t just shove her hands into her swaddling because if we did she’d scream so I decided to cut her nails. Keep in mind that I had been a parent for at the longest about six hours and this point.
So I cut her nails with a regular sized pair of nail clippers. Looking back on it, it was stupid but WTF did I know? So of course I cut a little too deep and there was some blood. Oddly enough, Riley never cried. That’s daddy’s little trooper. But one of the nurses came in to check on mother/child and saw a little blood welling near the tips of her fingers.
What followed was a half-hour conversation with a member of the local branch of Child Protective Services who acted like I had thrown the child into a wood chipper. I didn’t even know that there were smaller clippers for babies. I’m a man, okay? I was just trying to keep my baby from destroying her own face. I’m all for preventing abuse, but can we PLEASE be intelligent about what CONSTITUTES abuse?
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Yep. If you take your child to the doctor with ANY issue at all, you will be treated like you’re beating them 24/7. Meanwhile, there are kids kept in closets and fed dog food (often kids of families who are being watched by social services) and those no one investigates because they’re poor/immigrants/whatever and you wouldn’t want to seem discriminatory.
Same thing applied in the kids’ middle school. Our neighbor explained it “oh, they ignore offenses by disadvantaged kids and like to put middle class kids on probation, because they have good outcomes, and it makes their statistics better.” Note that my neighbor — a “progressive” — thought that was FINE number gaming. One of the cases she mentioned was a middle class — from our neighborhood — kid coming running and slapping his friend in the middle of the back, you know, like young men do, and both of them being written up for “fighting” in school. She thought it was funny.
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I saw an inequity just this week. A father fell asleep and his three year old child figured out how to go out the locked door and was wandering the neighborhood. (My sister did that once or twice when we were little). The man is now in jail awaiting trial for child neglect–
A few years back a woman (who was selling some things she shouldn’t –drugs and sex) would send her children, a three year old girl and a six year old boy, outside while she transacted her business. Her business usually happened from 6-midnight. The girl child would knock on people’s doors and say she was hungry. Several people in the neighborhood including the landlady called CPS. The mother was never charged and the children were still wandering the neighborhood at night. So yea– why wasn’t she put in prison. She was caught with drugs– put in jail for two weeks and her kids went to her sister (who was just as bad). Then the kids went back to their mother. I am shaking my head while writing this–
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The thing that bothers me most about this is that the only time you hear someone take issue with this sort of thing is when an upper class woman sees this sort of double standard play out against her own son. But the op-ed piece she writes will begin with something like, “now I’m a feminist, I subscribe to Ms. magazine, I went to such and such school, and here are some more in-group bona fides… but *this* has gone too far!”
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YEP
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I read that article. It reminded me that so often a cold dash of reality is a cure for liberal crap.
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It reminded me of the Coptic Christian guy that took the fall for the Benghazi attacks. Of the few people that came to his defense, most people would preface their remarks by pointing out just how horribly offensive his movie was, etc. etc.
I understand what all that talk is now. It’s saying, “I have no interest in challenging the narrative… I intend to limit my criticism to a very narrow range… (I wouldn’t be part of the conversation otherwise…) and please don’t excommunicate me from the tribe… just let me sew this tiny little patch on this old garment here.”
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Something I’ve said entirely too often the last decade is “Do they know the world they are building?”
Apparently, no. At least not most of them.
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Rob, the problem is that many of them know exactly what world they are building…. and see it as a feature, not a bug.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings are going to need a lumberyard of clue-by-four….
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Does everyone’s email blow up when a new comment is posted? I think I might be more a lurker, since I’m not sure what I can contribute. Engaging conversation though. :)
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I’m not a feminist, I wouldn’t use Ms. Magazine to line my parrot’s cage if I had a parrot — but I have two sons and this has gone WAY too far.
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Ms. Magazine* doesn’t even make good toilet paper substitute, because it is a glossy.
*actually had never heard of said magazine until this thread, so all observations are with approximately the same amount and quality of factual evidence as is used by frequent contributors to said magazine.
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I had to read it during college (class assignment). Some of the interviews were well done, as far as interviews go, especially those with foreign feminists (Romanian, East German). But this was in 1992. From what I’ve heard, it has neither mellowed nor improved, especially now that they are forced to defend the abuse and 2nd class status of women in other cultures.
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Because dealing with those kids and that mother is work. CPS avoids the hard work whenever they can.
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It is only fair that the scions of the patriarchy experience the flip side of the “white male privilege” which has so benefited them for generations. All in the name of “fairness” and redressing past wrongs, of course.
Payback is a b!tch and so’s your neighbor.
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It’s not just parents. I couple of years ago my sister sliced open her hand while cutting apples for pies. I took her to the emergency room, and because she was feeling a bit light-headed (she’s had…issues with gravity), had her sit in the waiting room while I checked her in. I told the nurse what was going on and she started asking me some really odd (not in the good way) questions until I realized she thought it was intentional.
It’s professional paranoia brought about by a fear of lawsuits and/or bureaucratic investigations.
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The SO, who has relatives in the SCA, tells the tale of a female fighter who was at her doctor for a checkup, and noticed the doc was asking a lot of questions about her boyfriend — questions like “what’s his temper like?”. It dawned on her: The doc was only seeing the bruises left over from the Wars, and had no idea she spent her weekends wearing armor and being hit with sticks.
On her next visit, she brought pics and literature from the Realm…. :)
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I have a friend who worries about that frequently. She recently posted a picture of a large bruise running down her forearm, saying she didn’t quite dare show it to her colleagues, and was wearing long sleeves, for that reason.
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I break myself in interesting ways. Between extreme house cleaning and furniture refinishing, it just happens. My standard answer to “You are safe. You can tell us if your husband did this” is now “Is he still breathing? If he is, he didn’t do this.” Sheesh. Anyone who spends more than ten minutes with me would know that. (And I learned early on not to try to parse “did he do this” — ie they’re not asking if he called me suddenly and made me trip/fall on something/drop something on my foot. They’re asking if he beat me.)
BTW my favorite of these was some bureaucrat (in Robert’s presence) finally breaking down and asking Marshall if someone at home beat him. Marsh — then three — went into what we called “Donald Duck voice” — now very rare, but normal when he was mad as a little — and started saying “My brother does, all the time” then turning around and attacking a startled Robert. Apparently that was the end of the mandatory interrogation sessions, though we were advised that Marshall was “violent.” (He weighed maybe 30 lbs and Robert weighed 60. Robert normally just looked surprised when Marshall tried to hit him, then brushed him away.)
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“Is he still breathing? If he is, he didn’t do this.”
Yeah, well, part of this friend’s criteria for a suitor was, “He has to be someone who can kick my ass.” (she’s a wonderful person, but a little nuts), so that would kind of make it difficult.
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Um… Dan IS stronger than I am, but I’m a berserker. It makes a difference.
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Strength has less to do with it than willingness to inflict damage — major or otherwise — on the other party.
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YES same here–
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There are very effective was to stop sustained breathing that require very little strength.
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I’m so stealing that line from you!
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My favorite was the VERY feminist writers’ group member who — when I was moving file cabinets to an outbuilding, tripped over a garden stone and bruised myself horribly, tried to get me to confess Dan beat me. I don’t think she’ll have forgiven me yet for saying “Yes, he beats me with a square implement the exact shape of my file cabinet… Are you NUTS?”
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I worked at an office that required that we take a “domestic violence 101 class”, and for the office it was needed since we dealt with a lot of messed up people. One of the workers showed up to work with a broken blood vessel in the sclera of her eye a couple of weeks after the class, and I mentioned (as suggested in the class) that it looked painful. She snarled at me, saying, “shut up. Your the fifth person today to say that to me.”
At least we all were listening.
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I got a few odd looks after getting “g-measles” and red eyes from high-g/ high negative g aerobatics (unusual attitude spin recovery training. Highly recommend, by the way).
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She’s not nuts, just left-wing. She doesn’t know how to think.
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Chinese menu thinking: she observed two facts from Column A (Sarah is in category “female married to male” AND Sarah has bruises) and drew one conclusion from Column B.
This process of reaching conclusions based upon comparative group status and observed conditions is much easier than actual thought. It takes a while for the actual programming, and requires regular updates as comparative group statuses change but it ensures consistent results regardless of actual facts.
For example, you only need know that the accused are white male fraternity jocks and the accuser is a black female to understand who is the guilty party.
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Speaking of categories and conclusions: Younger son was quoting “Date Rape” statistics at me yesterday, and refused to believe that they were so wildly misreported that they were worthless. He also said that “Morning after regret” was a valid reason to call it that.
Normally, he’s pretty sensible, but when it comes to things his teachers have disseminated, when I disagree with them, he’s blinded by his stubbornness.
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Today turned up this absolutely appropriate observation by Richard “Belmont Club” Fernandez:
If you push a round peg hard enough it will fit into a square hole.
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and also because ‘normal’ people don’t possibly do anything where they might risk getting bruised….
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Normal is boring.
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I remember being 17 and slipping on a piece of paper. I fell and caught myself awkwardly. Well, I was embarrassed but used to falling and figured I’d just pulled a muscle when my back hurt. The next day, I’m at work and can’t grip anything much less pick it up and I’m in tears because of the pain from trying. My boss calls my mom because I can’t pick up the phone and she picks me up. I convince her to let me wait it out until the next day because I’m just sure it’s not really anything and the doctor’s not open anyway.
Well, it gets to be Monday and I can’t use my arms at all. My mom decides to eschew the regular doctor and takes me to the emergency room. The doctor asks my mom to leave and then interrogates me for half an hour, trying to get me to tell him what “really” happened. He was just sure my mother was beating on me and that’s why I was hurt. They eventually gave me a single muscle relaxer which knocked me out for the next day but not until after some social worker had talked to my mom about drug-seeking behavior. It was the most surreal 2 hours of my life, and that’s including post-op for 2 c-sections.
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lets not even go into L.A. doctors and their tendency to scribble ‘drug seeking’ when you want treatment for PAIN….
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Nothing ever happens in isolation.
End of the baby boom coincided with the advent of better birth control methods. _And_ the women who’d held jobs during WWII and left them for their husbands, and started their families . . . and started wanting more. My mother started college when her youngest started kindergarten, in 1960. _And_, of course, this also coincided with modern antibiotics and vaccines. Childhood mortality plunged. Fewer births didn’t mean fewer children–I suspect the baby boom is partially an artifact of the lag time on this concept seeping into the culture. “I need to have four babies to have a good chance that two of them will live to adulthood” is a startling concept, now, not the given it used to be.
Knowledge of the cost? Big influence, IMO.
Desire to keep working? Big influence, IMO. I knew when I quit that I was torpedoing my career.
The bureaucrats and clipboard effect? I don’t think that effect hits until one already has one or two kids. Then the reality strikes. Before kids, it’s all “Oh yes, crack down on those horrible abusers!” After kids, it’s “Good grief, do I actually have to justify every bump and bruise?” and school absences. “Why should I take him to the doctor? He’s got a virus. Rest and fluids for a couple of days. What do you mean he’s going to have to repeat the grade because of unexcused absences? He’s an A student!”
Yeah, that last can make you think twice about producing kids three and four.
But the number one cause, IMO? ZPG, overpopulation, famine! The environmental movement of the sixties and seventies. We’re all going to starve! Or as Cedar put it, your aunt looks at you and says “You have too many kids.” The new normal is one or two, with childless an accepted option. And we all feel pressured to be fit in and be normal. Too many kids is _embarrassing_! And that social pressure isn’t going to let up anytime soon.
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The bureaucrat & clipboard brigade is a last straw.
Having and raising children is exhausting. Being aware of having the B&C Brigade monitoring you when you are already fretting over your inadequacies is even more exhausting. Exhaustion is a marvelous incentive toward contraceptive in an era when contraception is readily available.
Add in that your already meagre income (virtually all parents of small children have meagre income) is being taxed to support these buttinskies and the stress level is jacked up a serious notch.
Plus, as noted by Pam, the “I don’t know how anybody can bring a child into a world as troubled as this*, much less two, much less three …” sharp gazers can markedly increase the “what’s the use” quotient, further inducing you to fall in with the herd.
*If anybody actually based child-bearing on such a criterion the race would have died out long long ago. When wasn’t the world troubled?
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I have to agree with your number one cause– social pressure on this is crazy. I have five children and you wouldn’t believe how often I have people berate me for having too many kids. Even complete strangers feel free to do so.
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This was happening in the 70s and 80s as well btw. My father used to ask my grandmother “which one do you want to give back?”
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Which one do you want to give back?
The factory don’t accept returns.
Next!
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exactly–
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I’ve been filing complaints on this lemon for a body for fifty years. I think He rolls His eyes a LOT
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According to one popular theory, the current one is just a prototype. Once the manufacturer has seen how you handle it a more perfect one will be issued at an appropriate time.
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Like!
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They’re idiots. The population statistics are largely made up. About ten years ago I read some underground reports that even in the muslim world birth rates are falling. Right now we have the false assurance that population is growing brought on by people living longer. IOW we’re like the roadrunner running mid air.
When that fails and we see it nakedly, expect — in ten years say — panic and governments berating citizens on their duty to have a child.
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This is why they teach anti-math in schools these days: to prevent people from figuring out that if we’re maintaining population by virtue of people reaching 80+ instead of dying by 70, lest they start to realize that a shortage of people paying into Social Security and Medicare, coupled with an increase in the amount of time people are drawing money out of those funds just might possibly eventually cause a problem.
Nobody who thinks they will collect anything from Social Security retirement should be issued a HS diploma.
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The Japanese already have a bunch on manga on variations of this theme.
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I keep telling y’all you live in the wrong part of the country. 5 kids around here isn’t that unusual, and normal bumps and bruises aren’t considered abnormal*.
*Unless your crazy, B*TCH of a Mother-in-Law calls CPS because she sees 4 bruises on your hyperactive son. That’s probably the closest I have ever came to killing someone.
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Younger son Danny almost earned us a memorial couch at the ER based simply on number of visits. Both boys were constantly swiping my spare lumber to build bike ramps which were then used to beat both bikes and riders into submission.
Best adventure though was when I built Dan a hammock chair for his bedroom. Friend had one and Dan fell in love with it, so I surprised him by modifying a standard hammock into one, eye bolt through the ceiling rafters, heavy poly rope, sturdy knots.
Naturally one evening we hear a horrible crash and find that he has flown out of the chair and impacted the metal bracket of his bunk bed with his leg. Managed to incur a penetrating wound, so off to the ER we went. Usual routine, not nearly so crowded back in those days, but still the hassle of processing in, insurance forms, and so on. They took him back into the bowels of the hospital by himself, and I’m sure questioned him about which of us had beaten him, but eventually returned him to us x-ray’d, wound cleaned and bandaged, and with a suggestion of ibuprofen for the pain. Best part was weeks later when I got the statement from our insurance company. Long list of charges including line items for a pap smear and barium enema. Knew they hadn’t done the pap smear, and as well that had they attempted the enema everyone in the hospital would have known of it immediately. Was first time I realized how the typical not for profit hospital eats all those indigent care charges. I did contact the insurance company and essentially got a shoulder shrug, so had to believe it was fairly common practice.
And as for that hammock chair, I always felt slightly guilty for using poly rope thinking that the knots had slipped causing the misadventure. Just this past month 25 years later Dan admitted that the knots had not slipped. His habit was to swing wildly in the chair pushing off opposite walls and eventually this had worn clear through the heavy duty rope. Also explains why after the fact I could never find that damn rope. He disposed of the evidence.
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“He disposed of the evidence.”
And with kids that sharp, what chance do we have, really?
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Experience, speed and overwhelming fear.
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Revenge. What goes around comes around.
Dan now has two, a girl 11 and a boy 10. Both are every bit as evil and devious as their daddy was.
As I’ve said before, nothing quite so satisfying as that phone call: “You’ll never guess what that rotten grandkid of yours just did!”
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Spanking a cat is easy — just watch a momma cat with her kittens. A sharp thump of the forefinger on their forehead, just above and between the eyes, while emitting a disgusted hiss.
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Oh was going to say hiss– but the thump would be useful if the hiss doesn’t work ;-)
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It’s so funny to watch kittens try to do that to each other to assert dominance. Never works.
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The rich have staff to raise their kids — and lawyers to fight the bureaus and PR people to make the bureaus look like fools (okay, that ain’t hard, but getting it into the MSM can be.) The poor are victims of an unjust social and economic structure which forces them to deaden their desperation with the soothing balm of drink and drug and besides, they’re animals and what can you expect? It is only the middle-class (what the aristos sneeringly refer to as the bourgeois) who are compliant enough and weak enough to be bullied about by bureaucrats.
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We were infertile and fertility treatments were not covered by health insurance and we could not afford to pay for it ourselves. Then a friend of ours told us we could become foster parents for infants. We fostered four and adopted three, two of which had been drug exposed. We had social workers in our business for years, until after the adoptions were finalized. The social workers all liked us and we had no problems there. I think they liked us because all the walls in our home were covered in books; they’d come in grumpy, see the books, and then become friendly. Odd. We were legally prohibited from using any corporal punishment. Thankfully my wife had worked with autistic adults while she was in college and so knew practically how to use positive reinforcement and other techniques for discipline (and showed me how), so it worked out okay. The only big problem (okay, horrendous) was when the one child we did not adopt, a drug baby and brother of one we did adopt, died of SIDS at the age of two and a half months. We, the foster agency, the hospital, and the county were sued for 31 million dollars in a wrongful death suit. We had to pay for the attorney ourselves and received no help at all from either the county or the foster agency. Thankfully, after three years the suit was dismissed (it was, after all, a search for money from the county, but the county didn’t role over so the dismissal was inevitable.) Anyhow, the point is, that we would NEVER do foster care again, not because of the social workers (we’re still friendly with a couple of them) but because we learned the hard way that as a foster parent you have no protection at all legally, even when it is clearly not your fault. Our three adopted daughters are all mostly doing well (2 in high school, one in college), though the youngest does suffer from mental illness (from the drug exposure before she was born–meth, crack, alcohol, etc.) and so she is on independent study at home (she is, essentially, home-schooled, except she goes to her high school once a week for tests).
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I recommend (not for the first time, as long-time habitues of this forum wil recognize by rolling their eyes) Philip K. Howard’s 1995 book The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America.
In child-rearing, in entrepreneurship, in all matters of life the need to avoid being hassled by the petite bureaucracy and avoid getting our assets hauled into court have far too much influence on our decisions.
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And what do you get when you line up all the lawyers head to toe from Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, NC to Cape St. Vincent, Portugal?
A darn good start! So long as you weigh them down properly.
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I wager SPQR has a list he might be willing to make available for, oh, perpetual access to Sarah’s eARCs and a small referral fee.
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The problem is less the lawyers than the fact that inclination to use them like hammers tends to make people see nails.
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Yep, a good book.
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Lawyers all the way down?
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With just a modicum of luck, yes.
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The fact that “the perfect is the enemy” permeates our society, and what it does to our children is just one distressing example. I’m sure it was a significant factor in the outcome the last election, where conservative idealists decided that voting for the lesser of two evils was no longer satisfactory. I’m seeing it at work as I try to develop a course to be offered online but get departmental feedback about low pass rates with layers of bureaucratic box-checking put on top off it – nothing substantive to the course and nothing that pays attention to the trends in the market we serve – because everyone involved has a personal ideal of perfection that it will never meet. It’s frustrating to learn that “good enough” faces so much opposition.
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Yep on the election.
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Worse from my point of view – there’s no chance under the rule of perfection for imperfect people to learn or make improvement. I had a conversation with my brother a couple thanksgiving dinners ago, and he was a bit gleeful to see some high school kid getting expelled for some dumb stuff at prom, and the kid had apparently otherwise been one of the top students in his kids’ high school. No redemption allowed. Can’t quite figure out why he bought into the party line, but we avoid those sort of topics any more.
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And it’s crazy. There’s plenty of ways to discipline a kid before you get to expulsion or calling the cops or what-have-you, and adults are supposed to know those ways. Maybe it’s because some of today’s bureaucrat adults didn’t have siblings or friends or any decent raising.
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Oh, yeah, that was a lost learning opportunity. And a decent kid tossed away. I can’t see any benefit to the community there for having done that – it was that wasteful And the other kids learned that they can’t fail even once, which is another horrid lesson. [I’ll admit a bit of bias in the redemption area – my two oldest brothers (I had 4; the one above is the only one left) had the join the marine corps or get prosecuted option available when they were 17 or so and had dropped out of high school and become rather hooligan-ish in their behavior. They weren’t twins, but they were just a year apart, and school was so boring for them they couldn’t stay with it.]
Related to the crazy – I did the bureaucrat thing for a bit over 15 years and I think I can replicate the crazy thinking. One part is based on rewards and behaviors and the other on bureaucratic language. I’ll try to make the language point first, but the two are closely linked. [Pardon the boring-old-windbag mode of response; I’ve only been around here a few months and I want to make a thorough response, but I also fear I may be repeating things everyone knows.]
At their best, bureaucrats create ways to analyze collections of events or items, but to do so, they reduce the language to a rather limited language, often called a controlled language. The transference to forms creates a digital description of an analog event, kind of sort of. The language on forms limits what they’re able to record.
A “natural language” description: On my desk, is a dark green, 3 ring binder with D-shaped rings, and it is 3 inches thick. Controlled language example: 3-ring binder, D-ring, 3″ capacity, hunter green, 1 ea. Natural language: A boy and a girl play catch in the park. Controlled language: Daily Park Visitor Count: 2. (Or “1 female, 1 male”.) Heard from a police officer after a very odd one car accident: “I always wanted to check the “Act of God” box on the accident report.” (Car, moving cautiously while leaving a sporting arena, hit a patch of ice that wasn’t visible in the lighting conditions and ended up sitting on top of a fire hydrant. The office saw the whole accident.)
Which leads to behaviors and rewards: promotions and evaluations must be based on measurable criteria, at least around here. X number of forms processed in a week, task completion by Y time after receipt, etc. Getting a doc off one’s desk is more important than the actual completeness of the doc – a return if not completed correctly still moves the doc off the desk. And there will be movement path recommendations – office/agency use only sections of a form. The bureaucratic food chain will mark their approval/recommendation boxes and move the thing along until it hits the desk of someone who can mark a final resolution. Actual resolution is largely irrelevant to a properly organized process – and the people moving the paper don’t really have time to care about its contents.
At my nephew’s prom, the kid with the beer would likely have been reported on some incident report as a checked box next to “alcohol on campus”. I doubt very seriously there was a checkbox in the form resolution path that said “mercy, 1 ea” so the outcome for the kid was as fair as regular form processing could make it. And no one in the hierarchy there would benefit by picking a resolution that wasn’t on the form.
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An illustration of the Bureaucrat’s idea of a well-run hospital: 500+ administrative & support jobs, no medical staff, not patients.
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Heh. I read C. Northcote Parkinson as a textbook in my freshman seminar all those years ago. Videos like this one just enhance the memory of that.
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ok i just spent thirty minute watching clips from that show….
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hey, if anyone here is still awake, take a look at the news. listening to a streaming police scanner here, sounds like they’ve got at least one of the boston creeps cornered.
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GF is watching it on TV. they shot an MIT campus cop and the cops gave chase, no word on any connection to the marathon bombers.
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listening a a boston police scanner online, they confirmed that they’re chasing white-hat.
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ok WCBV boston says they are the marathon suspects. The primary marathon bombing suspect has been killed.
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Kindofa funny name, too, en’it? Sounds Greek to me. Let’s hope his hard drive etc. is recovered intact.
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Chechen Islamic terrorists.
If THEY are going to start coming here and doing this crap, we’re in trouble. Everybody remembers Beslan, right?
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YES– the gassing of a theater– there has been some terrible things on both sides in Chechnya– ugh– as bad or worse than some of the Mid-east attacks.
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Russian name– (ov ending)– heard originally from Chechnya
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Wayne, Beslan comes to mind every time walk into the school where I work.
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Yuck. That must make it difficult.
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I had kids in school when Beslan happened. Remember? I wish I could forget.
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According to a foreign paper they are Kirgizstani, not Chechyns.
At least they were born in Kyrgizstan.
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One of the suspect brothers, the dead one, was named Tamerlan. Am I the only person who noticed this? If anyone in the media did, they don’t dare mention it.
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Nope. I was trying not to jump to conclusions, but when I saw that, well…lets be honest, not going to be many Christians (particularly not ones with slavic names) named after Tamerlane. I mean, in the west, someone might name their kid Tamerlane cuz they thought it sounded cool, but methinks that’s significantly less common in Russia.
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My brief fear that their parents were mad Marlowe fans was extinguished by the Chechen names. Yep “devout Muslims” — but as someone noted on Stephen Green’s page — was it Islam or the Ivy league and the constant pounding of anti-Americanism that sent these two mad?
Or yes?
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*snort* I dunno if only being here for a year or two of it was enough to convince people to go on a killing spree, but I’ll bet it didn’t do anything to discourage them
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I think it was more than a year or two, though I could be wrong. But look at it as a foreigner “if even Americans say they’re that bad, and we know they dress things up” — well…
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I hear it was ten years now– so the older brother has been here since he was sixteen and the younger brother since he was nine. The older brother imho could have already been a part of the jihadist by the time he moved here. It would be easy to turn a brother– in this case. OF course speculation on my part– One of the brothers became a US citizen six months ago btw.
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Of course.
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I am trying to find a source of the time they lived in the States– I heard it on the radio in a news report. The brother’s uncle said that the family had been in the US since 2003.
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That long? The year or two is based on the reddit thread @ 6:30 this morning, when I gave up and went to bed. It probably is out of date by now.
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Yea– from the uncle’s lips– the brothers have an aunt in Canada who is saying that the media reports and the pictures are staged. Ugh
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When I heard that they had attended the same school as Matt Damon and Benn Affleck, I recalled that Damon had been a neighbor of and greatly influenced by Howard Zinn — and thought it likely that Zinn’s books are probably a major part of that school’s curriculum. So it is highly unlikely that the two brothers did not learn a deep and uncritical love of the United States in school. It makes their actions all the more incredible.
/sarc
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It struck me as an odd name for a Muslim, akin to a Christian named Mohammed or a Jew named Titus.
I would probably be more surprised by a MSM talking head making any connection of historical significance than by their failure to do so.
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In class now, can’t link, but wiki him. Doesn’t seem unusual to me at all, particularly for one from the Caucasus.
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Oops – my error. I remembered he was mongol and that he had razed Baghdad but not that he styled himself the “Sword of Islam.”
It has been a long time since I read my Harold Lamb biographies of Timur, Temujin and Hannibal.
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A derivative of Tamburlaine, yes. And yes, Army of Islam.
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I thought the name sounded familiar, from a Tamora Pierce novel, but my local morning show gave the thumbnail biography of “13th century guy who killed higher percentage of world population than Hitler, built a throne out of the skulls of non-believers.”
Apparently their uncle is indicating they’re losers who refused to assimilate. From the quotes from mom and dad, they come by the psycho honestly.
The co-exist sticker on the run-over-your-brother-to-escape car is priceless, as is their having graduated from a high school that brags about how diverse they are.
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Yes, a lot of irony there.
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If you look at the scholarship list of the other recipients (along with ye little psychopath) from the city of Cambridge, there are something like 30 names and less than three “normal”. (Less than three because one of the chicks has one of those “my parents were insufferable pedants” names.)
Now, I DOUBT most of the area is “weird ethnicity/religion.” It might be, but I doubt it. So I’d say scholarship has more to do with “how I hate America, let me count the ways” than actual merit. (Sigh.)
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YES– plus at least the older brother has been around the cool-aid for awhile– The radicals give young men like these ego strokes by calling them soldiers of Allah.
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Is funny how they get all bent out of shape over “Christian Soldiers” even though those soldiers are metaphorical. Less charitable minds than mine (I s’pose there must be some) might suspect them of adhering to le Standard Double’.
I rather prefer calling such “Soldiers of Allah” by a shorter term: corpses. I am a live and let live kinda person, but if you can’t get behind the second part I’m all for addressing the first.
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SOMETHING is sure as heck going down up there. Ed Driscoll at PJM is providing a pretty good news feed/summary.
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Keep in mind the principle: Initial Reports Are Usually Wrong.
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Great show, isn’t it? Search Youtube for Comedy Connections: Yes Minister for a good background on it. Because production on it took so much time they couldn’t touch current events and ended up with timeless comedy. Apparently politicians told the producers that while they had perfectly captured the bureaucrats they’d gotten the pols all wrong. Meanwhile, the ‘crats were telling them while they’d gotten the bureaucracy horribly wrong they had gotten the pols dead to rights.
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Sara, your DNS entry appears to have been hacked. A number of the addresses returned by a query point to static.reverse.ltdomains.com instead of wordpress.com. I had to make a static entry in my hosts file to get your blog today.
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Did I yell cruel and unusual stuff at them? Oh, heck, yes. I even (gasp) spanked their bottom (mostly while they were still in diapers. After that we could take the computer cord away, though the 10 year old oldest won himself an epic, chase-him-out-of-the-kitchen by smacking his behind twice, because he came in and tried to tell me how to cook.
One of the great things my mom taught me was how to “smack.” There’s a special sort of swat that makes a LOT of noise, but doesn’t hurt– it’s hard to demonstrate on yourself, although I can get a pretty epic sounding slap on my own face. Much more effective on diapered behinds, ESPECIALLY the disposables.
I also yell. A lot. Volume is part of how they know something is Important. (this is partly training for letting them go to the ranch, where volume= urgency)
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My father, a pediatrician, used to remind mothers of patients that there was a reason the curve of an adult hand exactly fit the curve of a toddler’s diapered rump.
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Incidentally, I have a spraybottle for the car. It’s a minivan, and there are very few roads we drive on where “don’t make me stop” is more of a threat to them than to me!”
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I wholeheartedly agree with the post on so many different levels!!! (I will just be so grateful if we get all our kids raised to adulthood without CPS being called on us. I don’t know if we will be so lucky.)
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Life isn’t perfect and it isn’t fair either.
All were are doing is teaching our kids the unrealistic expectation that they will get their way and life will turn out all right with out any hardships or struggle. That there’s no consequences for our actions. That stupid shouldn’t hurt, and stupid should hurt…
How else do we learn not to do stupid things?
How else do we learn how to deal with lifes disappointments, if we put our kids in a bubble of no kid should feel discomfort.
Kids our less fragile than some would have us believe, and by over protecting them we make them fragile; instead of, trying to making them “Antifragile.”
**LANGUAGE WARNING**
Goerge Carlin – Kids
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Reductio ad absurdum as Official Government Policy??
National Review Online:
I very much doubt any among us are indifferent to the problems imposed by any disability, but I think all can agree that this is ridiculous.
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I know where the over-reaching burro-cracy comes from.
The phrase used as the post title should read in full: “The perfect is the enemy of the good — but so is the inadequate”. And entirely too many “parents” (note quotes) these days are utterly, woefully inadequate for the task. (My personal bete noire? “Counting Parents”: The one who, when the kid goes apeshit in public and starts tearing the store apart, responds by demonstrating to anyone within earshot she — and it is *always*, 100% of the time, a She — can count to 10 without using her fingers.) Most parents these days either overdo it to start with (dog food and closets); or underdo it too long, and then either overcorrect, or wind up in court (or a funeral home) asking “Wha’happun?”. Then the Media gets hold of this, and “SOMETHING MUST BE DONE — IT’Z FO’ DE CHILLUNS!”. Boom, Instant Overweening Burro-cracy.
In my day — and that was the 1970s, folks — if I screwed up that badly, my street turned into a Roman legion fustuarium; two lines of adults I had to run between to get home, everyone taking a swipe en passant. Fortunately for my still-almost-nonexistant ass, I rarely screwed up badly enough to get caught.
I suppose this is why so many Baen authors are writing about “end of society as we know it” scenarios — deep down in places they don’t talk about at BFC, they know: It’s going to take “Passive Eugenics” to fix things, as badly fucked up as they are now.
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I spent half an hour, once, trying to coax my three year old out of the play area in a Fred Meyers.
I wasn’t allowed to go in– even though she was the only one there– and the lady watching her wasn’t allowed to touch her.
All because of liability. Thanks, lawsuit people…..
If THAT seemed like a reasonable public policy, there must’ve been some pretty dang dumb stuff happening. I know I’ve gone into “Timmy, no” mode once or twice when I thought someone was watching with way too much interest.
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When mine were little, I found that, when in unfamiliar places, waving to them and saying, “Bye!”, then turning around and starting to walk away worked wonders. I suppose not all children would react that way, but one symptom of ADHD is a tendency to be a bit uncomfortable without a parent around.
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LOL. YES. For Marshall it was “Call us when you find a job” — worked till he was 14.
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Nah, she wanted to stay and play. I’d already let her stay while I wasted as much time as I could manage.
If she hadn’t wanted to be left, it’d be a good solution!
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A GREAT post. I’ve met people who told me of their perfect childhoods which left me thinking that they were either a couple sandwiches shy of a decent lunch, lying through their teeth, or had terrible memories. My parents were both old school upper Midwest who believed that sparing the rod spoiled the child. It seemed to me that either I was extremely stupid or unlucky because I was continually being caught doing that which had been forbidden while my brother rarely caused either of our parents to break a sweat. Very strange, but I survived and mostly by doing that which was as far from “normal” as I dared.
With old age has come the belief that if what I’m doing isn’t outright illegal or immoral it’s nobody’s business but my wife’s and dog’s. My wife will offer comments based on reason, the dog just acts like he doesn’t know me or what I’m about. Being ab, or as some have pointed out, sub normal doesn’t bother me much anymore though.
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Sarah, if my foster dad hadn’t opened his door to bureaucrats 8 times, none of us foster kids would have turned out worth a damn. All of us were high risk kids (due to abuse, molestation, more abuse, anger management issues, etc) and nobody wanted to deal with any of us. I know I was a problem case (extremely high intelligence, no schooling (learned how to read and do math by watching TV at one of the group homes), anger issues, raped as a small boy… laundry list of sh*t) and he invited those pesky bureaucrats in just so he could try to give me normalcy.
So sometimes you have to let the vampires in just to save someone.
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Jason,
I know this and you know how much I want more kids — so you know I struggle with this everyday, particularly given that the one thing I did before translation and writing was teach high-iq, high-risk kids, and considering what we went through with Marshall who could very easily have dropped through the cracks.
But I also know my — Portuguese, I suspect — method of parenting which involves high octane screaming. (My mom told me once I screamed at the boys too much :-O) And I know very well what would be made of it in the US.
That said, not foster (I’m awful even at fostering cats. I don’t want them to go) but I understand CO always has a backup of latino sibling groups, and now Portuguese is OFFICIALLY “Latino” they wouldn’t even blink. If the indie thing pays for me as it has for other people with massive backlists (so that I can hire someone to cook, clean and do the editing and ebook conversion. No kid deserves a mother they only see from the back while she types) it becomes a possibility.
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One of my methods for rectifying transgressions was having the miscreant run laps around my nearly two acre yard (about a 1/4 mile). “My side hurts, Dad.” “Too bad, keep going.” One of the boys became good enough to run cross country in high school (until he discovered weed anyway). The other never did enjoy the running. One time my neighbor called the sheriff because I carried a long slender stick for tapping the slowing down butt. When I explained to the deputy that the running was in lieu of hitting, he told me next time make sure my neighbor wasn’t watching.
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Actually, Sarah, I counted at least 25 normal first names. (Plus some “normal for the ethnicity, at least three generations old in the US.”) The US has always been big on faddy names by generation; it’s a dominant trait among both conservative and liberal US groups.
Of course, I had a great-great-great-aunt named Sardis, as well as ones with the given names “George Washington,” “Abraham Lincoln,” and a selection of ’98 Irish rebel leaders. So yep, I got no room to talk….
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For those trying to follow along at home…..
http://www.cambridgema.gov/citynewsandpublications/news/detail.aspx?path=%2Fsitecore%2Fcontent%2Fhome%2Fcitynewsandpublications%2Fnews%2F2011%2F05%2Fcongratulations2011cityscholarshiprecipients
Sarah Adkins, Arjun Agarwala, Jason Tang, Neyka Alexandre, Paola Arias Sanabria, Ty Atkin, Ariane Berelowitch, Samuel Borrus, Samisa Brioso, Joan Brunetta, Gina Chen, Gwendolyn Child, Abina Cohen, Kayla Coleman, Katrina Cooper, Judy Cortes, Anne-Marie Denis, Sira Fati, Jillian Felie, Hannah Firestone, Carlos Galvao, Kidan Gebremedhin, Yordanos Gebremichl, Adam Gelaw, Lillianna Griggs, David Guan, Pouchy Guerrier, Michael Sferza-Lewis, Hichem Hadjeres, Regina Hallisey, Pasang Lhamo, Rebecca Loh, Rebecca Mazur, Amatullah Mervin, Kathleen Mullen, Suryani Dewa Ayu, Liam O’Leary, Rebecca Pearce-Probst, Megan Rebello, Rose Schutzberg, Hyun-Wook Seo, Alexandros Stefanakis, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Dorcas Yip, Fesehaye Zewdie.
Guessing this is your list, Banshee?
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Another page of lists:
http://www.cpsd.us/crls/SS2011/Scholarships.html
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“George Washington” appears to have been fairly common for some time after the revolution. I had at least three in known family genealogy. No Abraham Lincolns, but being in Kentucky, I don’t know my family’s leanings at the time, though they were probably kind of ambivalent on the matter.
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