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parentsUhhg, this little meme got me right in the gut. It’s true, cuts right to the heart of the matter. I’ve felt this truth myself many times over the years, as if to say, “my kids are being taught things that are not going to serve them well at all.”

I kind of walk in two worlds, I come from some pretty dysfunctional parenting. Many of the people I know did not grow up loved and nurtured. There was often a  lot of abuse, chaos, and trying to be caretakers of our own broken parents. So one role I have is that of a child recovering from bad parenting.

Pay attention to what that kind of recovery looks like though, because there is this huge difference going on. It’s healing, restoration (as much as it is possible,) and a determination to not be a victim, to go forth and honor your parents by being the best that you can be. It’s a lot of hard work, a lot of leaning on the Lord, but that’s the mindset.

Then I walk in this other world of parents bound and determined to give it their all and to invest everything they have in their kids. Nobody is perfect, we all have our flaws, but I am speaking of the parents who decided to actually invest in fully loving their kids into adulthood. So my other role is that of a parent recovering from, well recovering from some real abuse from the culture that did not respect me, that did not support me, and that kind of taught my kids to do the same.

I’m kind of angry about all that abuse, that disrespect over the years. Angry at my kids,  not so much. I’m more angry at the public school system, political narratives, a corrupt medical system, and child protective services. A community that has worked in tandem to teach kids how to disrespect any and all authority, even the authority of those who love them unconditionally, who would likely lay down their very lives for them.

I was talking to a mom the other day with a grown child.  She lost her when she was 13  to a system that tells kids that they need the government to protect them from their ignorant parents, and that their medical records are private.  A system that put a 13 year old on birth control, treated her for STD’s, and never said a word about the 30 year old man who was plying her with drugs and sexually exploiting her. Then the system “helped” some more by prescribing opioids for her pain which lead to addiction. Today that child is fairly stable thank God, on Suboxone, but mom sure isn’t. Mom isn’t okay at all.

And neither am I.

How do you even process the fact that the system, the government basically,  treated your child as a commodity? A cash cow. They made a ton of money off of making her dysfunctional, getting her addicted to opioids, and now they get to make a ton of money  off of getting her sober?

I know that story so very well, that grief and frustration, that sense of powerless, because I too feel as if I basically lost a daughter to a system that taught her that I (and her dad) were the bad guy’s she needed protection from, and then proceeded to use her as a financial commodity. Everybody knows better then mom because mom is just an uneducated hick, sexually repressed, and probably a racist, too. Yep, my kids who never set foot on a reservation, never lived in the projects, have no idea where their mother even comes from, were actually taught that it was okay to dismiss and disrespect me because, probably racist.

Today I am stuck on the sidelines, my kids are now on their own journey, and my grandkids too, but it is still excruciatingly painful stuff, there is an anger within that threatens to spill out sometimes, an anger that just wants to crush this soul wrenching evil and gleefully feast off it’s bones. It’s a deep betrayal that wants revenge served cold with a nice chianti and some fava beans.

I’m telling you, I really need to go drink some blood out of the skulls of my enemies.

My kids, misled, deceived into foolishly calling their mom a racist, do not realize that my story is really not much different then the story of so many black women, moms trying desperately to hang onto their kids in a world working so hard to make them victims, trying to use them as commodities. Trying to get them killed. It’s the same story told by so many Indian moms, kids taken away and sent to government schools, many who did not return, many who did not even survive. It’s a story told down through the generations, from grandma to grandma, a story those of us from the wrong side of the tracks know very well.

Somewhat ironic, bitterly ironic, but the very essence of “white privilege,”  the motherlode of all cultural entitlement,  is the blissful ignorance of not knowing that story, not understanding the nature of the war,  having no awareness of who the enemy even is anymore. Hint: it’s not your mother.

I hope these words encourage someone. I hope they are a balm for someone’s soul, a truth that needs to be spoken in a world gone mad. I know so many mothers who have had their hearts ripped out and chewed up by our culture, so many who are fighting a battle they know they cannot win, tormented by regret and guilt that does not even belong to them.