Detailing My Stance on Children

I just have to get this out. People really hate me or think I'm a psycho when they hear me say something snide or sarcastic about parents and their children. Forgive me. I don't really hate children. I feel sorry for them and their parents. Oh, I know I'm supposed to congratulate a new mom who's changing her baby's diaper, and I know I'm suppose to look at the proud parents holding their youngin's hands with a smile of pride and approval, but that's not the way I really feel. I don't believe in that kind of stuff anymore. I've seen too much bad stuff go down in those nuclear type of families. It's not "Little House on the Prairie" or "The Waltons" anymore. After "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" really showed me what Americans think about the family, I could never look at parents and children the same way again.

Plus what I went through as a single mother. They called me a "plague on society". They called me a "welfare mooch". They called me a "hit and run accident". They called me "stupid". All the while I was killing myself trying to prove that I could earn an education that would get me and my son out of welfare life and into the "normal" family-style life that all those parents and children "smile" about. It was never going to happen. After DCF removed my child from my custody, I went through hell to get him back. It took me about six months of jumping through hoops (parenting classes for a woman with an education degree?) and following all their rules to get him back. But it was so hopeless. I didn't have a teaching job. I didn't have a house to raise him in. He needed a house, and a father. I had neither to give him. So they took him again, saying I was "not stable" because I was Bipolar, and that I neglected him. I was too damned tired! Working all week just to serve him a bowl of spaghetti in a shitty house, cleaning everything by myself, taking care of the car, the bills, everything and the kid all by myself. I can't even imagine how much worse it would have been if I had a husband to attend to at the same time. I would have died or been hospitalized a lot sooner than one kid did to me.

So yeah I have a chip on my shoulder. Yeah, I'm bitter. My childhood wasn't rotten. I was raised by a very different kind of mom. But she raised me with all the right morals and standards of society. I went to good schools. I was loved, even spoiled if you ask my family. I was disciplined too, sometimes severly. I was raised with the good book, and Jesus, and Catholic ceremonies. I had all that. So what went wrong? Nobody wanted me, that's what went wrong. There was no marriage proposal when I graduated from high school like Bella snd Edward in Twilight. I had to go to work. I was lonely as hell and promiscuous, because that was "normal" in the 90s. I worked, I went home and ordered a pizza, and I watched some movies. If I got lucky, I got laid once every few months, by whoever wanted to act like they liked me.

That wasn't satisfying so I got pregnant. I hoped it would make my life more meaningful. It did in some ways. It lit a fire under my ass to do something better with my life than just party and watch movies. I got my college degree, that was something. And I loved my son more than I had ever loved anyone else in the whole world, even if the world and my son says that I was a terrible mother. There were definitely worse mothers in the world than me.

But now, after all these years, I just can't look at the parents and children the way I did 30 years ago. Back then, I used to look at them with envy and a sense of "Wow, they really got it right." Not anymore. Now I look at them with terror and wonder which one is carrying the cross the hardest? Which one has nightmares while they sleep? Which one is the cruelest? Which one cries the most? Which one bleeds the most? Which one works the most? Which one is the most miserable? That's how I feel when I see parents and children. I doubt that perception will change for me the rest of this life. I've seen too much bad, and felt too much sad about it for it to change.

Sometimes I get so sad and lonely, I want a dog so badly. I just want to love and be loved by a dog so that I can make up for these awful feelings I have about parents and children. But it's easier for me just to buy a stuffed animal or a doll. I pretend that's my baby now. I hug it and love it and I can't mess up. My doll would never call me a bad mother.