It occurs to me that many kids seem to screw up when it comes to choosing their parents. We all encounter the horror stories. What is wrong with these kids? The same phenomenon crops up in the choices of husbands, wives and pals made by adults. As the comic Wanda Sykes often says, “PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER, BABY!”
Some of us have parents whose number one priority seems to be having fun. Why, then, did they have us? We usually get no coherent answer to this question. Raising children is hard work, something that thinking people realize from the git-go. The late comic Redd Foxx often got asked why he never created offspring. He said something on the order of, “Oh, God, I have a horrible life. I admire parents. I watch them from the deck of my yacht, sitting next to my lady, while I enjoy a daiquiri…”
One American writer, who looked like your typical church lady—chubby, silver-haired, conservatively dressed and always smiling—murdered her husband because he constantly cheated on her and also earned a lousy salary. She had written an unsuccessful romance novel called The Wrong Husband.
There was that kid with a martini in his lunchbox. There were the 13 siblings who never saw daylight. (I could go on.) These are the survivors. Why didn’t they exercise choice?
One of the former principals in Law & Order had an Italian great-grandfather who was found in a baby box. Someone with an unexpected child used to be able to sneak over to such a box, set into the wall of a convent, and place their infant inside. [Kathy sez: “There is no such thing as an illegitimate child.”] This ancestor eventually moved to the U.S. I think every state has a law that allows unfortunate parents to leave their child in a “safe haven” (a hospital, a police station, etc.) without legal consequences.
Many couples who cannot produce their own children are frantic to adopt, often resorting to overseas adoption. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t, as witnessed by those people whose Eastern European child turned out to be a tiny malicious adult.
Kids: fuhgawdsake, do a better job of selecting your parents. Adults, memorize the location of your area’s baby box!—Kathryn Nocerino