Stinking New Year's Eve

Lily and Tony, best friends since toddlerhood, now both sophomores in high school, recreating the pose of the two of them taken some 13 or so years ago.

I realize how curmudgeonly I'm sounding, but reading the news this morning just about sent me hollering out into the meadow.

Even I know who Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are, although I don't have a clue about his music, nor do I care, what's bugging me is that every news organization is reporting that she's knocked up.

Hey world, I don't care.

Not married and she's a role model for all the idiotic young women who inexplicably wanna be just like her.  I'm of the Murphy Brown fallout school of morality.  Turns out Dan Quale was right. I truly believe that all these unmarried young women are dooming their children to a life of poverty, non-nurturing, and difficulty and will drag numerous "father" figures through the kid's lives, upping their risk exponentially to violence and instability.  The statistics bear me out.

“Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong,” the vice president said. “Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”

For women under age 30, more than half of babies are born out of wedlock. A lifestyle once associated with poverty has become mainstream. The only group of parents for whom marriage continues to be the norm is the college-educated. 

Those who live with their biological parents do better in school and are less likely to get pregnant or arrested. They have lower rates of suicide, achieve higher levels of education and earn more as adults. 

Read more here.

Wake up young women of America and demand some respect for yourselves.  Leave that unemployed bum who is babysitting your children while he's using drugs.  Are you stinking crazy?

Oh my.  Then I turn back around here and deal with our own difficulties...and Lord Have Mercy!  I have knowledge, resources, patience and abilities.

My cyclothymic disordered one, for once, did not provoke the violence that ensued last night.  He was in my office with me, not bothering anyone at all, when two who are innately violent just went off on him right in front of me.  I stood up and got between everyone, demanding they leave him alone, they upped their anger and shoved him so hard into a wall that my older boys came running to protect me.

I was absolutely furious.

Trying to explain for the billionth time that hitting, shoving or touching anyone is assault, that you can go to jail for that, only to have one shout back that 'jail would be better than here - you suck' while holding the cell phone I'm paying for, in the house I'm providing that's full of food and everything they need.  Didn't I just provide a wonderful Florida vacation? Oh my, it's very hard to keep on keeping on sometime.

Like this is even the real issue?  Can you say Holiday Hell?  The time in which the mom who does parent properly is slammed for doing so - because silently it means the birth mom chose not to do so - therefore one must make the other pay.

It sure does get old.

The victim started crying, which was very appropriate, he's older than the other two, but smaller and un-muscular.  I sent everyone to their rooms and I cleaned the kitchen like a steam roller.  I might've smashed a plate in my complete frustration.  I swept it up.

Happy Stinking New Year.

I took the five youngest ones up to my room to eat popcorn and watch taped Duck Dynasty shows.

About two hours later the meanest- acting one came upstairs to apologize.

I, of course, accepted it fairly graciously, but pointing out that these behaviors will cost him every relationship he ever embarks upon just pissed him off again.  Instead of comprehending that I'm only trying to help him, that I want him to be a happy and productive member of society, instead I must've only touched upon that unseen, overly sensitive nerve that sets him off irrationally.

Dude, this is called parenting.  Mom's must redirect, must correct behaviors.

They are always unreasonable.  Period.  Both of them.  They trash the kitchen all the time, deny doing what I watched them doing, say that I always blame them for doing what I just pointed out they did step by step.  It is an unchangeable issue, it feels.  I've raised all their older siblings and watched every single one of them deny any responsibility for any and every thing.

Then they go out into the world blaming the policemen for arresting them when they weren't doing anything wrong.  Yes, Honey, those mean old cops like doing extra paperwork.  As if.

I generally just disengage and clean it all up my own self, it's just easier, but I have to step in when they are threatening others.

I'd seen this simmering within them all day, it's as if they have this crappy need to explode in order to resolve what they are feeling.  They'd been snarling at everyone, they'd been rude when I corrected their behaviors, which is usually enough of a catalyst itself.  As if I dared parenting them...

Disengage Cindy.  Deep Breathing.  Restrain yourself from informing them that this isn't gonna work out too good for them in the real world.

One of them is wearing braces that cost more'n my truck - out of pocket expenses, no Medicaid nor insurance covers it.  You're welcome very much.  I haven't been able to see my osteopathic doctor in two years due to a lack of cash.  All this I don't say.

I'd not been injured, nor had the other one, just shoved, but that's unacceptable behavior and the two offenders completely don't understand why I find that to be offensive.  He usually does an excellent job of provoking them, yet he'd not been that way one iota yesterday, if anything, he'd been clearly avoiding them.

Needless to say I didn't wait up for midnight.

I'd worked in my greenhouse, picked a ton of lettuce that I piled into my flat bread piled with beans and guacamole, FHPS and Tofutti (vegan) sour cream, I'd weeded and watered the Swiss Chard, gotten a message from Travis and Kimberly about a big stash of curbside leaves nearby, I'd divided and replanted a Dieffenbachia plant, watered a ton of others, and added wood chips to the greenhouse plantings.

A good day that ended badly.  But this thin leaf lettuce was uncommonly tasty.