It wasn't that long ago that we had Boy and his school friends here. I remember their good days and some of their bad days, when they would get angry and down realizing they did not have the support maybe they saw our son did. I would honestly go out of my way for these boys, if they needed some clothes, if they stayed with us for a long weekend, we would listen to them, whatever it took so they would feel like they mattered and they too were important.
I can't say we were a positive in any of their lives, but only one and just in the last few months has popped out a kid. To me, that defines a life a little out of control, shoot, it happened to us with Boy, but we made it work. On the flip side, I think having Boy a little before we were ready is why we are still not where I want to be financially, but we will get there.
So now that Javalina is approaching that age where him and his friends aren't little boys but starting to become young men, he is starting to hear similar trending stories. One of his friends from kinder is wanting distance saying he "wants a girlfriend and to stop hanging out with the gang all the time." I can understand wanting a GF, we all want someone who will care about us personally, who wants to see the best version of ourselves come to life, but it does worry me that at the same time he wants to sever the connection to the group he has known since they started going to school. This upsets my son, because he cares about his friends and knows that this one is going through a rough patch. He is being raised by Grandma, mom and dad are not around. His older sister struggles to get him necessities like earlier he was running around in an old jacket. I offered to buy him one, but he felt weird taking a "handout". Eventually, I bought him a couple hoodies and just gave them to him at home, saying here I already bought them, Javalina says he was wearing them regularly afterwards.
Yesterday, I spent a few hours with another set of Javalina's friends, the jock ones. He likes to compartmentalize. His oldest friends come over and spend the night once a month or so. These, he had never even brought over. He feels weird that we have so much and some of them don't have even a room of their own. I always remind him, like we would tell Boy "well, you don't have shit, we do. You are as poor as any of your friends, you're just lucky to live under our roof."
It was funny, sort of, to hear them busting his balls, like wow, you have your own room and bed, I have to share my bed... I don't even get a bed, I sleep in a box... I am pretty sure that was sarcasm. Even as simply taking them out to eat, we couldn't choose a place because the two boys I brought along hardly ever eat out. One of them said "I ate at Bill Miller like 4 years ago." I told him we eat there like twice a week, Javalina loves it.
I really wish parents were better, but the reality is that like in everything, people generally suck. Selfish assholes that abandon their kids, decide to start other families and ignore the first set of kids. These poor kids did nothing wrong, but they get to still exist trying to fit in.
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