Caterwauling

I try not to post anything, oh, relevant on this blog because honestly, I just don’t care to raise a discussion about current events.

But then, shit like this has to happen. And fuck it — I pay for this space for a reason and it’s not to hide my opinion.

“After a night of drinking, Chytoria Lata Graham … ‘snapped,’ the Erie woman told police. She grabbed the couple’s month-old son and swung him through the air by the legs, using the blanket-swaddled infant as a weapon to strike her boyfriend.”

Full disclosure: I held two positions in the Pittsburgh area as a mandated reporter for child abuse — one from within the county system; the other in a foster care agency. Tiff and I used to consider ourselves a “child abuse speedtrap” when we’d get together outside of work — the times we could have called social services to report questionable parenting practices? Not a low number.

That said, I am so angry I could go bludgeon that crazy-ass bitch myself. I don’t have to get on any moral high horse; I just wonder WTF she was thinking. I mean, she already had four other kids — was this one disposable? I mean, two of her other kids were called in to assure police that the boyfriend wasn’t the one who injured the infant, which means they SAW it happen. ARGH!!!

I admit, I hated working in child welfare. First, my heart couldn’t take it — you were fucking with people’s lives, livelihoods and family bonds. Decisions were never easy. Consequences were astronomical. You never left your work at the office — not when you were dispatching caseworkers to Children’s Hosptial at 3 a.m. to document allegations and ensure rape kits were being done on 7-year-olds before the investigation could begin. You had to find that scared, damaged child(ren) a place to sleep for what little was left of the night, because you yanked them out in their PJs if you needed to — if they needed a teddy bear, tough luck. Sadly enough. We’d have to get them one later.

Aside from the heart-wrenching stuff, I’m pretty damned liberal, but even that field was too barking-moonbat for my taste. We used to have visitation rooms for children to get to spend time with their birthparents on neutral ground, and as we’d installed two-way mirrors, well, we got an eyeful.

I remember when one kid started sassing a parent. Said parent? Doled out a spanking. Whereupon the visit was broken up, the child was taken out of the building and the parent received some punishment — visitations revoked; there might have been some legal recourse or an attempt thereof.

I’m not saying it’s ever right to beat the shit out of a child, but hot damn, sometimes reasoning doesn’t happen. I took my share of licks and believe me, that’s why I’m alive and a fairly civilized individual today.

In any event, I think it’s time to sterilize some of these women. I know, the company I worked for was all about rehabilitiating the biological parents. And good for them. My job was to find funding for the children who found themselves in foster care, to provide them with programs and activities and clothes and food and resources for their caregivers who were pretty poor themselves.

Not all foster parents go into it willingly. Not all foster parents have wealth and space to house a set of siblings. Many do it for the good of not only keeping A family together, but keeping THEIR extended family together. They are the ones who need the most help.

So when I was taxed with finding money to go visit the moms and dads in jail to give them parenting classes, I’d pretty much had it. Not saying it couldn’t work, but I didn’t rank it among my priorities. Which apparently weren’t mine to set, but I’ll digress before that rant starts flowing.

* Bottom line is that we need to somehow create a way to keep these crazy assholes from reproducing (again).

* We’ve got to take care of the kids who are popping out suffering from withdrawal from whatever drugs their mothers were taking while pregnant.

* We’ve got to help the kids heal who’ve been unnecessarily injured, physically and emotionally.

* We’ve got to find a better alternative than group homes for the older kids who are beyond the “adoptable” stage.

* We’ve got to find a way to stop the cycle of abuse and neglect — we’ve got to stop enabling these bad influences to ever get their hands on these precious children again.

* We’ve got to expose these kids to better things, bigger things — education and culture and extracurricular activities and spiritual pursuits and unconditional love. They’re oftentimes sad and withdrawn and embarrassed to be bouncing from school to school or showing up with a black eye (or a neurological disorder) from Mommy’s crack binge. They’re good kids with a terrible set of circumstances to rise above.

Let’s not bring even more of them into the world. Let’s figure out how to help the ones we’ve got already.

We all know I’m pro-choice. No secrets here. But who’s getting the procedure done? Educated women — women who want to be more secure before they bring a child in this world. Even if they aren’t educated, maybe they can afford whatever it costs these days to get it done. Some of the better insurance plans even cover it.

But from my exposure to the child welfare system, these parents deemed to be unfit were young, poor, unaware of their choices, or maybe altogether too aware of their options. Maybe they were trying to trap a man. Maybe they figured they’d pop out the kid and the state would pay for it. (I can tell you stories. …) Maybe they said they can’t have an abortion because God doesn’t allow for it.

Let me tell you something. We’re all buffet-style Christians. We take what we want and we don’t acknowledge what we don’t believe in. I get that. BUT …

Don’t tell me what a great Christian you are, who just cannot “kill” your baby, when you fell to your back and spread your legs in the first place. If you want to play this game, let’s talk about the part where you’re not supposed to be having sex out of wedlock.

(For the record, I rather enjoy sex out of wedlock — I wouldn’t get any otherwise. But if you’re going to do that, then don’t make the argument that birth control isn’t accepted by your church. And no, I’m not talking about that procedure as birth control.)

It’s (some of) these same assholes who tell us in one breath that God wants them to give birth who end up beating the shit out of these precious little angels they insisted on bringing into this world. Ever seen a crack baby in the neonatal unit at the hospital? Try it sometime. I can’t speak for God, but I would certainly applaud the crack whore who terminates an ill-fated pregnancy.

The WaPo reports that Baby Jarron is in stable condition at Children’s Hospital. And that’s good, but I wonder whether the best resolution would be for the child to not make it. Charge nutjob mama with homicide and get her fertile ass offa the streets.

But what about the father? He shouldn’t be punching women or spreading his demon seed, either. It’s likely he probably did deserve to be walloped with a blunt object.

What fries my ass is how difficult it is to recover from a simple life choice mistake or career misstep — yet these two might and probably will go on to have a normal (let’s not quibble over semantics about THAT word) life with their kids and maybe even make a bunch more. *shudder*

You know, the Internet never forgets. It’s not like a halfway-literate kid with a computer can’t Google his parents and find out that they nearly murdered him. Christ, I’m still mad that there’s no Easter Bunny — what else is my family hiding from me that I shouldn’t know about? 😉

A good mother would have fought with her life to ensure that child stayed protected. No mother I know would have done what she did. Was it self-defense? Temporary insanity? (Don’t answer that.) Permanent stupidity?

Bottom line, put these kids in the witness protection program, change their names and reprogram them to forget this time in their lives. I’d suggest donating their parents’ eggs/sperm to the local cryo banks for those struggling with infertility, but I am loath to perpetuate that stunning example of a gene pool any further.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 9:40 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.