“You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a
car – hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let
any butt-reaming asshole be a father.”
. . . who’s to say who’s a good parent or not?
Right now, the system is stacked in favour of middle-American values
and mores, and a lot of poor families are penalized by the system
(esp. CPS) for being poor.
A case in point . . . this one dates back to when I was in college.
My roommate and I lived upstairs from a couple with two kids who were,
like much of the county, very poor. He was generally high on pot (and
we actually kept our bathroom door closed and the window open a lot of
the time, otherwise, because of some weird ventilation in the creaky
old building, we’d get a contact high while brushing our teeth–which
you’d think was a good thing for poor college students, but neither of
us tolerated it well). They both drank quite a bit. But there was
never any doubt in our minds that they loved the little guys. (Even
though they did almost kill us all one night when they were out of
fuel oil and decided to run a propane heater in the livingroom. But
that’s a case of ignorance, not malice).
This is not a way I would choose to raise my kids, and not an
environment that I think it particularly healthy–but I think the
alternative (foster care) is often (if not nearly always) worse. I
believe we have a biological imperative toward our offspring that,
even though we’ve done a pretty good job of severing and undermining
those ties at a societal level, is still deep within.
There’s plenty of things I wouldn’t choose for the environment to
raise my children in: guns, tobacco, drugs, rotting floorboards,
pesticides, junk food, lead-leaden lunch boxes, air pollution,
violence, public schools, television, euphemistically “sassy” clothing
for girls (think Barbie lingerie), war, crime, fundamentalists of all
stripes, idiot drivers, mildew, acrylic yarn, industry meat, and
packaged chemical mixes labeled “food.”
But I can’t control all of these factors, and we’re likely to
encounter and interact with most of them, and a whole host of them are
things that are seen as benign and part of many people’s lives.
(Heck, giant multi-coloured dustbunnies wafting through the house, and
running around in the woods [where we have bears, and moose, and
coyotes, and porcupines and probably a cougar] is part of our lives .
. . and a lot of people probably don’t think those are all that
healthy).
So I figure that there’s a lot of variety in the world, and where we
see a need, we (ourselves, not a phone call to some faceless agency)
ought to work toward filling it.
I had a conversation once with my neighbor from across the street. It
was a small, rural town with a population under 2000 and an
unemployment rate over 20%. The first interaction I had with this guy
was the night I moved in, and we were tearing out the (25 yo) carpet,
and he came over to ask if he could have it. (Sure–then I don’t have
to take it to the dump, right?). Anyway, a few years later, I was
painting the porch, when he came over to chat. And Mike said that his
son was newly engaged, but he was a little worried about the girl’s
family. Mike and his wife had raised three of their own kids, and
taken in several teenagers along the way who’d been kicked out of
their homes . . . and he mentioned that they’d never made over 10K in
a year (we were having this conversation in 1999). And what he was
concerned about was that this girl’s parents were white collar
professionals–a doctor and a lawyer, I think. And he said, “I told
my son, “I don’t care if you marry the biggest whore in town, if you
love her and she loves you” . . . but, Jen, I can’t see our families
sitting down together for a holiday meal, you know what I mean?”
So here we have the tables turned, but the same basic premise: what’s normal in one house is not necessarily in another.
