A Murder of Crows - Volume 27

Well as my daughter’s boyfriend just came back from boot camp, I am pretty much convinced that I am his surrogate parent. It’s an ok thing because I like him and think he’s a very good match for my daughter in general, but it also makes me rather sad that it has come down to that as well. What I mean in general is that I can’t for the life of me understand his mother and the way that she thinks. Her son basically joined the military to get out of his subservience to a mother that doesn’t work, and has no problem leaching off of her sons. It’s amusing that as long as I have known him I just found out today that he is the YOUNGER brother of his mother’s brood, and that worried me a bit, because he had always taken care of his mother and his older brother?

You see, I knew most of the story because his mother had thrown him out of her apartment prior to him leaving for boot camp. Why you may ask? Well it was because she was furious that she wouldn’t be able to pay her rent while he waited for his first paycheck. Yep, you heard that right, it was because she wouldn’t be able to pay her rent without him paying it for her. Apparently he and his brother had been splitting the bills for years, and his mother found no shame in this whatsoever, because after all she had given birth to them and they were fortunate for that. I really didn’t know the entire dynamics until today when I took him out to get my other car repaired {the one that I loan him when he is in town because he has nobody else to loan him one} and I made the comment that it was hard to worry about your younger brother. He then corrected me that the sycophantic brother who was also angry that he ran off to the army instead of taking care of their mother was the OLDER brother. Holy moly.

Now I have made jokes about his mother before, because before the days of Oprah Winfrey and the rest of the bad behavior apologists, you were allowed to pick on people like this. She doesn’t have a job because she has “emotional problems.” Well as my ex-wife has “emotional problems” I consider myself a forced expert on these things and often “emotional problems” don’t exactly mean “emotional problems” and from what I have discerned these are those types of “emotional problems.” My daughter’s poor boyfriend was raised to look forward to the day when the food stamps or the welfare check came in. He'd come home from school where his mother would be video taping soap opera's with the money from the welfare check. This was what my children went through until I ended up with them and in the exact same manner, welfare check meant new VCR tapes or liquor, and food stamps meant junk food with the change going into the alcohol redemption fund. I am not saying that everyone does these things but I am dealing with these two examples.

Using the “bucket of crabs” theory that there are always crabs in the bottom trying to drag you back down, my daughter’s boyfriend escaped and is doing his best to refuse to jump back in the bucket. I had told him what I have tried to tell my ex-wife, which is that parents are parents and not surrogate children. Parents that treat their children like the parents need to be escaped from and I support his decision. I also told him that my mother was along the same lines, and surprise surprise, I made sure I married women just like her. I of course had to recommend to him that he might want to be wary of these things. My daughter has actually made me so amazingly proud of her as she has been what most men would hope their military wives would be like. She’s been unwaveringly loyal to him while he is away. She couldn’t consider anyone else, and even her boyfriend appreciated that as a lot of the men that he is in the army with don’t get that luxury. I told him that we are what our parents make us, and if we choose to stay that way we only have ourselves to blame, and he already understood that one.

I appreciated how well he took it when at the dinner table last year, I was asked by my aunt what I really thought about my 16 year old daughter dating a 19 year old. Between bites of food I simply said, “I thought about it for a while, and decided that there are distinct advantages to my daughter dating a 19 year old man,” and my aunt wasn't happy that I wasn't immediately banning the concept from the first moment she brought him home. I wasn't put on this earth to back up all of her thoughts, but as I continued I left the audience shocked, “seriously, if she dated a boy her own age then I would have no recourse if he did something stupid. If he does something stupid, I could tear his head off and beat him within an inch of his life, and most likely get away with it in court,” and the way he started choking on his food was the perfect response. Needless to say he has been the best boyfriend I ever could have wished for my daughter, and in turn he made out pretty well, as I adopted him as my son-in-law to compensate for what little he has in lines of his own family. It's been pretty fair.

There was a benefit to spending the day with what most fathers would consider “the enemy” and transporting him around to grab my other car for him, giving him one of these extra too heavy coats I bought recently {oh yeah the airline lost his and the other three soldiers on the plane’s luggage .. nobody else’s just the big green duffel bags .. I smell fish} and a few pairs of my jeans that the army helped him fit into while he was gone. I was the only one who knew he was back in town. When my daughter got home from school, I was able to grab her and tell her to go downstairs to my office, and look at something I had on my computer. I stayed upstairs so the scream wouldn’t destroy my ears. It came close with a floor between us. I gave them about 15 minutes to kiss and catch up and then threw them both out of my office. I can only take being a human being for so long out of the day ;8o)

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Nothing that was printed here was intended to offend anyone, and if it did, screw ya, you begged for it. If you believe that there are some measures that can be taken to change me, then please feel free to pray for me, and while you are at it yourself, because you read this far, and if you hated every minute of it, then you are an idiot, not me, or the other people who like what I have to say! .. Jeremy

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