And the plot sickens. She has a new boyfriend. I’ll spare the details other than to say he’s not one you’d want your daughter to bring home, to put it mildly.
This child is damned and there is nothing that can be done save perhaps calling DHR the second she does anything deserving. And of course we all know how efficient and well funded and underworked the DHR departments of large cities are; I’m sure they’ll…
Well in other news, it turns out I’m not the father of Anna Nicole’s baby after all. I had her mistaken with one of those Deal or No Deal models, or with Zsa Zsa’s husband. It’s hard to tell in dark lighting.
Hijacking my own thread, but supposedly Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie are going to be in a new movie version as Heathcliff and Catherine respectively. (No word yet on who plays Theo, Vanessa or Rudy.)
Isn’t there a companion novel written in the last few years about Heathcliff’s “missing years”? It’s set in the Caribbean slave trade iirc. I haven’t read it but I’ve heard good reviews, though a simple google doesn’t bring it up.
Wuthering Heights has already been written (though I’ll admit it was pretty good, except for the shameless and knock-you-over-the-head-with-it “don’t adopt swarmy Liverpudlian orphans” message).
I don’t know about that, but there is something called Wide Sargasso Sea which is set in the Caribbean. It focuses on Emily’s sister Charlotte’s character of Edward Rochester in his younger years, when he meets and marries his wife (the mysterious Grace Pool in Jane Eyre) in Jamaica, and her slowly going insane before he takes her back to England to freak out Jane.
Edit to say, I love your posts Sampiro, and I hope everything works out. Poor baby.
You know, what weirds me out most about this whole saga is how much you KNOW about this idiot. In all my fucked-up phases, I’d do everything in my power to make sure NO ONE knew anything. As few as possible anyway. If my friends knew about something I did or that happened to me, my parents sure didn’t. If my parents knew about something, my friends sure didn’t. My parents would be mortified and none of their friends or relatives would be told about it. My brother didn’t know anything about anything (except for that one time I ran away from home at 16 and he had to come halfway across the country to get me when I got caught). Rare was the time when everyone knew about something. I’ll bet this bitch has had much more going on than you or anyone else knows, even if she is a attention-seeking drama queen.
While I understand the policy, it’s kindofa shame that we can’t “go anonymous” sometimes to post. I wasn’t anywhere NEAR as fucked up as your ex-SO’s sister, but I do know a bit about being a fucked-up pregnant fuckup. No way would I write in detail about it though. Unfortunately the SDMB has some people who keep track of such things and bring up faults and foibles and fuck-ups in other threads, usually in a Pit thread argument. So, all I can say is, there’s not too much anyone can do about the girl. She’ll fall and fail or wake up and rise on her own. Taking the baby with her down into the sewer is the problem, and I have no solutions.
I won’t embarrass myself by attempting a sentence constructed even remotely like Sampiro’s but I’ll say: Damn, Sampiro, you are my favourite story teller and I live for your posts.
And I am green with envy at your writing talent and awesome sense of humour!
Sadly, the way she’s been living with those cats, she’s probably contracted toxo already. Unless the pregnant mom is exposed to for toxo for the first time ever during the first trimester, there won’t be any birthdefects. (link) And even then, the most severe problems are mental retardation. Last thing this family needs is someone who is definitively mentally retarded.
Advice: Play up the idea of adoptive parents helping with living costs. Double edges sword, since she might decide to make a career out of this. Find one of those studies about how much money kids eat through in the corse of their lifetimes in real numbers. Break it down into a monthly cost and compare it with her other monthy expenses to her income. Be sure to include exactly how many hours a week she would need to work at her nametag job to get that much money.
Last ditch effort: Take her to a religious group who supports adoption, since she seems willing to listen to them.
My answer to the OP: DON’T. I was an impoverished, ne’er do well, college dropout when I got pregnant, and when someone came to me saying “give the baby up for adoption” I said “take a number”. I was taken aback by the assumptions that I would never do better.
Now KidUnit is almost 15, I put myself through college and got a good career going, her Dad and I are back together, and all those judgmental people continue, in my opinion, to be seen as complete and total retards who thought they knew what was best for us.
Although it truly does seem that you don’t care what she, her loved ones, and/or her children will think of you.
If SHE’S decided she’s keeping the kid, that’s HER decision, no matter what it looks like on the surface.
Just a note on this comment: I’ve lived with cats all my life, but when I got pregnant I was spending the summer in Europe, and was tested for toxoplasmosis (standard test there), and I was negative!! So don’t take chances.
I love your storytelling skills as always, Sampiro, but what a heartbreaking tale. Good luck to your friend.
The difference is, you have good decision-making skills, a work ethic, and presumably passable taste in SOs. Not everyone has all or even one of those, and the subject of the OP is a good example. If she hasn’t learned by now how to NOT be a degenerate, sponging, irresponsible hussy, nothing short of brain injury causing complete neurological alterations will teach her.
Let’s recap:
You = responsible adult who took on an unplanned pregnancy with an iron will to succeed.
Her = overgrown five year old who got knocked up like a sow in a barn.
Part of me agrees with Oregon sunshine that such an experience can be a reality check for a normally-constituted young woman, and can turn out well. Hell, I even knew a raped teenage girl whose son (the product of that rape) is the light of her life, some 15 years later. Humans often surprise me, often in a good way.
However, from Sampiro’s description at least, I can’t see whence this girl will find the resources of character to make such a change. I feel for that baby, and I hope that her dysfunctional family, in spite of everything, will be supportive of this child.
Generally, no. Dinah, yes. It’s next to impossible not to feel superior to her. I’ve known her for a decade now (kind of like a Ptolemaic epicycle acquaintance as she orbits one in my orbit) and can honestly say that the death of either of my dogs would bother me immeasurably more. (Admittedly there are many people whose deaths would bother me less than one of my dogs, but her’s would bother me less than most.)
I’m truly and sincerely glad that all worked out for you. I think you would acknowledge, however, you’re more exception than the rule.
My grandfather was a heavy smoker for 60 years and never suffered a day’s ill health from it, I once knew a man who survived a Nazi concentration camp AND lung cancer AND a plane crash*, I’ve a cousin who can be covered in honeybees without being stung- some people defy odds, but I certainly wouldn’t sell insurance to most others doing the same things. I’ve known people who were single mothers or were raised by single mothers due to illegitimacy/death/separation and most turned out fine- I’m not knocking them in general, it’s this one in particular I have a problem with. Nothing in her past or her present suggests she will rise to the responsibility; she’s never been capable of supporting herself or even sticking to something as demanding as a modeling course; she’s been fired from several jobs and has never had one that paid more than minimum wage. She’s not a college dropout, incidentally, but a flunk out.
She’s currently living with an ex-con boyfriend (the conviction was for a violent crime, though as Dinah points out, “He was on drugs then, he’s not anymore!” so that’s okay) in a weekly motel in Atlanta at the corner of Crackhouse Ave. and Day Labor Blvd… The room’s paid for by her parents (who cannot afford it) and the neighborhood’s so dangerous they push furniture against the door at night (or as I suppose you could call it, “pre natal care”) yet she has TURNED DOWN a free-of-charge double-wide trailer owned by her step-mother in a town in north Alabama (it’s part of an estate so it can’t be sold or moved) and an offer to move in with her (admittedly annoying) grandmother because “I don’t want to live in the boondocks and Goose (that’s what her boyfriend is called {and that’s NOT a pseudonym, that’s actually what he goes by- you can’t make this shit up- how’d you like to be twinky white 20 year old on your first day in prison when you’re known as “Goose”?}) doesn’t want to move to Alabama and who can blame him?” (Yeah, Alabama’s not a cultured up place for sophisticates like they is.) So they remain in the hotel pushing furniture against the door when it sounds violent outside (or as it’s called in this situation, “Pre-Natal Care”).
Much of this is irrelevant to your post but more of an update.
One of my closest/oldest friends is a professional pushing 40 who’s considering single motherhood (bio-clock, always wanted a child, boyfriend isn’t interested) but she’s well established financially/benefits wise and I’ve no doubts she’ll make a great mother if she goes through with it (the absence of a co-parent will be offset by a large circle of friends and family). My main concern with most women (or men, though that’s rarer) who decide to become single parents is the time commitment they’re taking on- I honestly can’t understand how so many can put aside their own needs and fulfillment for so long and go home from hectic jobs to talk about kid’s projects and make costumes for the 3rd grade play; I’d go berserk and end up on the news naked on a rooftop quoting from the last scene of Medea, but I realize that’s projection.
I’ve known many people raised in or presiding over very successful single parent homes, sometimes through illegitimacy and other times through death or separation. Some of my best friends have grown up in poverty- I did a tour of duty for several years after my father died and came out alright- it’s doable. What invariably made the difference though was character, courage, focus and ambition of the mother and the children. This woman ain’t got ‘em; she’s never been self supporting, she still sees herself far more as somebody’s child than somebody’s mother even though she’s 25, and there’s gonna be a child of the damned epicycling the person I am closest to and thus by extension me and I have to accept my impotence in the matter as does he. (I actually originally opened this at his request, incidentally, because he was hoping there was something he was overlooking that might convince her.)
So acceptance of the situation while entertaining fantasies of Julio-Claudian style sibling vengeance and awaiting the birth seem all that can be done. My envisioning of said birth involves a stormy evening where workers on the 70th floors of Atlanta skyscrapers are debating whether to report the pack of mad dogs flying outside their windows, graves spewing up coffins like ordure from a backed up toilet from Newnan to Conyers, an old woman slashing herself while praying backwards in the corner of the delivery room for no apparent reason and who nobody seems to notice, and of course the hooded figure who walks forward to gnaw through the cord before beginning the child’s “special instruction” in the cave by the Chattahoochee on Thursdays and Saturdays (“but not too early cause I sleep in and so do the singing rattlesnakes”).
Nope. I honestly hope I’ll die before I’m a figure as taking and non-giving and who elicits as much vulgarity when my name appears on somebody’s CALLER ID screen as the state Dinah has reached in 25 years. Except for her brother, whose fury mine pales next to, and her mom, who’s just such a pitiful creature. (I tried to get her to move into my place for a while just for respite but she’s too concerned over her daughter to leave Atlanta even for a week; she’s been hospitalized for the stress/depression/anxiety over this child.)
*[HIJACK]His name was Sam Grossman {his real name but not his birth name} and I’ll hijack this post strictly because he’s such an exercise in irony. He survived two concentration camps, an attack later by an anti-semitic Turkish drill sergeant in the U.S. army, said lung cancer and said plane crash [in the army] and lots of other minor and major tragedies and ailments, only to die from falling off a ladder and hitting his head on the wall while changing a light bulb in his house. His wife commented that she couldn’t believe it when the EMTs told her he was dead because “You don’t survive Hitler and cancer and a plane crash to die from changing a light bulb in Birmingham, Alabama!”, though apparently you can. As my daddy used to say “It’s in absurdities too well placed to be spontaneously arising we find the best evidence of God”. [Of course Daddy also drank a lot.][/HIJACK]