As a newspaper reporter, I covered and was around a fair number of crime scenes involving juvenile delinquents, and few things bothered me more than listening to their parents. Crying, ranting, proclaiming how great their children were despite being kicked out of school or previous run-ins with the law.
The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.
I met with my lawyers. They gave me all the wrong advice. For a long time I refused to accept the child was mine. I should have met her, arranged a DNA test and accepted my responsibility.
My father had nine children, and when I had my first, he said, 'None of my kids got up in the middle of the night.' And I remember thinking, 'You didn't get up in the middle of the night! Every kid gets up in the middle of the night!'
Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we'll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.
I lived in L.A. for a few months. It seemed like no one there had parents. Or if they did have parents, they would deny it.
When a parent denies a child its parent time, that parent is denying the child its child support - its psychological child support.
My mother tried to kill me when I was a baby. She denied it. She said she thought the plastic bag would keep me fresh.
There aren't a lot of ironclad rules of family life, but here's one: No matter how much your parents deny it - and here's betting they deny it a lot - they have a favorite child. And if you're a parent, so do you.
Would you deny your son or your daughter the ecstasy of finding someone to love?
There is a huge boom in autism right now because inattentive mothers and competitive dads want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can't compete academically, so they throw money into the happy laps of shrinks . . . to get back diagnoses that help explain away the deficiencies of their junior morons. I don't give a [bleep] what these crackerjack whack jobs tell you - yer kid is NOT autistic. He's just stupid. Or lazy. Or both.
There must be such a thing as a child with average ability, but you can't find a parent who will admit that it is his child.
My mom died before she knew I was gay, and my dad thought it was a phase, then realized it wasn't.
Young men kill someone for a handful of coins, then are remorseless, even casual: Hey, man, things happen. And their parents nab the culprit: it was the city, the cops, the system, the crowd, the music. Anyone but him. Anyone but me.
My parents didn't know what to do with me, so they just pretended I was normal, and that worked out quite well for me.
