By Drew
I am not a father.
Within the group Nal is the only one responsible for a human life. We have collectively decided that Kaizen is our interim child until it’s our time. You know the old poem, “When the condom breaks, the baby will fall and down will go your dreams, good looks and all”.
Or something like that.
I don’t keep up with nursery rhymes.
I remember the day Renaldo told me he was going to have a child. It was one of those very sobering moments when you can’t just say, “That bug you! lol”, buy him a scotch and keep it moving. All of us had to adult in that moment.
But then Kaizen was born and, very soon after he stopped looking like a ball of brown yogurt with legs 3 things were confirmed:
1) That’s Nal child.
2) Nal was going to ruin this kids life because he is Nal and…
3) Plot Twist: He totally didn’t ruin his life and is one of many savage parents I’d like to recognize today.
It’s weird being in your 30’s. All your friends are either married or have kids and seem to have formed subgroups. There’s the parents who think their kids are perfect and can do no wrong.
Then there’s the parents who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing and it’s evident by how horribly wrong things are going.
There’s the oblivious parent who has no idea how batshit crazy and violently ugly their child is.
Sidenote: There’s a group of you, usually women, on Facebook and Instagram that see how frightfully unattractive these people’s children are and you love to “like”, “love” and comment nice things under the mountains of pictures these people put up.
Stop
You know you’re wrong and you know that child looks like ugly got death pregnant at Buju Banton’s house. Then they wanna give the kid a not ugly name like Sade, Beyonce, or Mariah. I need y’all to start naming these kids the way they look and stop referencing beautiful people that they are clearly not. A lion is a lion, an apple is an apple and little Amethyst should be named Gertrude or, I don’t know, Shabba Ranks. Something that fits whatever their face isn’t….. which is cute.
…back on topic now, stop distracting me.
Then there are the outliers. The savage parents. These are the mothers that quite plainly will tell you which child they like and which one they love because they have to. These are the fathers that didn’t settle for the minivan and still bought that Kia coupe and let the young blood listen to vintage Ol Dirty Bastard.
These parents are the chosen few.
You see there seems to be a culture of bullshit parents that, due to social media, have deluded us all into thinking they are perfect at their jobs. They post the pretty pictures and then try and have that bleed into their daily lives. You see them ignoring how insanely god awful their kids are or just in general their kid is shrouded in sadness. You don’t even have to meet their children, just hear them talk and you know how messed up their kids are.
Is it hard raising kids? I have 0 clue…..as I said earlier, I have none. But the savage parents seem to know their truth. They will tell you how bad their kids are and why you just have to let them cry.
And now school is starting and with it comes traffic and your shitty kids going to harass strangers for another year.
Sidenote: I need ALL of you parents to know that I hate all of you next week. Its nothing personal, I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at the fact that I can only leave home at either 6 am or 10 am to get to work due to traffic because that mistake you made 4yrs ago has to go learn to be a functional human being. I’m convinced that all children in the world go to either Kingsway, SAC or St Annes cause goddamn man.
60 seconds later…
But see, here come the savage parents being amazing.
Know what they do?
Have their child in school at like 7am and tell them, “Godspeed”, and carry their ass to work. Carpool the little fuckers with whoever parents don’t work and seems to love kids and “jamming out” to 98.7 FM in the morning. Or they just plain old get the kid there at 9:45am because “responsibility” won’t be the reason they don’t look good this morning.
That’s me as a parent.
And if I DID have a job that required me to be to work for 9am on the dot then I need y’all to look away while I bump this good ass Kanye West in my car. Ya I know it has cursing and I heard you in your holier than thou minivan playing Kirk Franklin but guess who’s kids are gonna be prepared for real world shit come the winter of their lives?
Yip, the savage parents.
And therein is the crux of my argument.
I think my general “audience”, all 4 of you, are between the ages of 25 and 45….we’ve all lived to varying degrees. We’ve had experiences. Why not impart those very real experiences to your very real children?
I see a lot of parents still trying to beat abstinence down these kids throat.
Really nigga?
How did that work out for you?
Why hold your child to an impossible standard that not even you could adhere to?
The biggest mistake you can make is thinking these kids don’t notice shit. Trust they do. They know or have an idea of most of your secrets that you think you hide so why hide them completely? Just let them know it’s not their time yet.
Now to the psychos out there, I’m not saying to show your ass to your kids (Literally or figuratively). I’m just saying you gotta give them a spoonful of reality before the grand ice cream sunday of heartbreak and broken dreams.
Nal doesn’t let any of us curse around Kaizen and if you know me you know that’s a tall goddamn order. You should see us at John’s house trying to dodge curse words like bullets.
Nal is trying his hardest to cushion the fall of reality that that kid will face on the school ground and in life. He gives him a handful of niggadry to keep him balanced. We slip up here and there but in the end it’s him and 7 grown niggas watching sports and talking shit about females in the most PG way possible.
Rather PG than G is all I’m saying. Some of y’all need to give your kids some of that “Inside Out” realness and stop feeding them that “Cinderella” bullshit.
These kids are growing up in a different time and we need to recognize that.
Back in the day my mother could shield her 4 kids from all the evils of the world. We had no internet and the most provocative thing on ZNS was “The Young and The Restless”.
That was back when you watched scrambled satellite porn. These young kids are masterbating willy nilly to quality, well scripted, free porn. Meanwhile, if you were an 80’s baby (with satellite might I add), you had to maneuver a goddamn 30ft satellite to the right position so you could pull up a scrambled image of a vagina for 20 seconds.
How long do you think you can hide their face from reality exactly?
Listen, I’m not saying to be one of these parents that just lets their kids run around unchecked. We’re all seeing what happens when you don’t punish children.
But understand not a lot of people expected to have a child. Miss me with this bullshit of “if you have sex then you should be ready for the consequences.” Yes it’s true to an extent but things happen and life doesn’t always go as planned. Sometimes a mistake can lead to a blessing via struggle and then sometimes a mistake leads to whatever the hell Young Thug is.
Not everyone wanted or even anticipated parenthood so for a lot of people they are just doing the best they can with what they have and luckily enough the direct approach seems to be working.
There’s something to be said for people that can acknowledge they aren’t perfect parents but they’re doing their best. Something redeeming for parents that have left their children a little better than what/who they were at that age. Something refreshing when parents know their truth concerning their kids.
And something Godly when you can give them enough of you for them to know the difference.
So here’s to the single mother doing it alone every fucking day against all odds in a man’s world no less. Here’s to the single father that society has turned a blind eye to because they would rather see the delinquents than to acknowledge the Mufasa’s amongst us getting the goddamn job done. To the past teenage parent that survived that crucible and have raised kings and queens when they themselves were labeled lesser than by an unforgiving island and people that will never know what it took to get this far. To the parents that don’t have it all together but are trying to make this thing work and not raise baby Hitler while maintaining a happy home.
To the fathers raising young legends and teaching them the old ways…
To the mothers that show their daughters that a woman is as beautiful as she is layered, as strong as she is empathetic and not the one sided lie that society tells us…
And to the fathers that hold the door open while their sons learn the steps forward…
What’s past is prologue.
I pray their stories are better than yours.
Stay(childishly)Woke