his page houses one of the odder blog topics I've ever written about. Just as the page title says, these entries are all about the weird parents of your friends, when you were a kid. Weirder yet, a year and a half after I first wrote about the subject, naming the first names of some of my friends and the odd stuff I remembered, I got an email from one of the people I'd named; a guy I hadn't seen or thought about in well over a decade.

What did he think about seeing his childhood weirdness blogged about so publicly? Read on and find out.

November 4, 2002

Think back to when you were a child.  You had friends, you went over to their houses sometimes, and once there you came into contact with their parents.  If you have many memories of that, you'll almost certainly remember some of those adults being... well, pretty damn weird.  A friend whose dad was always drinking and falling asleep on the couch, or a mom who wouldn't let you in the house unless you took off your shoes and wiped your bare feet, or something else along those lines.

The tricky part is that as a kid you probably didn't have the objectivity or analytical skills to notice how odd they were.  Kids with psycho parents are in the worst situation, since they grow up thinking mom and/or dad are normal, and only gradually begin to realize that their mom storing every day's edition of the newspaper in ceiling-high stacks all down the hallway is a bit weird. Much less kids stuck with really nutty parents; Christian Scientists or basket cases or sloppo drunks.

One example.  I was in about 8th grade, and was new to the San Diego area, living with my mom, after having been in Arlington, Texas with my dad for 6-7th grade. First new friends I made were two kids my age, Ken and Johnny, who lived on streets next to each other, not far from where my dad lives now.  I'd hung out with them at a park a few times, where we'd ride bikes around (this was a couple of years before I got mainly into riding skateboards, rather than BMX bikes) and shoot some hoops.  They both lived pretty near the park, but I hadn't seen their houses.

One day after a week or two, I rode back over with them.  We were hanging around Johnny's house, out in the street, talking or riding bikes or whatever 13 y/o's do to kill time.  As kids are wont, I lost track of time and didn't realize it was getting late and I hadn't called home.  Near dusk, when I was realizing that I needed to get going, my mom suddenly drives up.

This was a shock to us all since she had no idea where I was, had never been to this kid's house before, etc.  Sort of the magical appearance thing parents do.  We put my bike into her car and she drove me home, and I could tell she was mad, and figured it was at me.  Her story was: 

She'd figured I was with the new friends I'd been talking about recently, and when it was getting late and I wasn't home, she figured I was with them and had lost track of time. So she drove to the park, but I wasn't there, so she went home and looked in the phone book, hunting up Johnny's name.  I don't even remember his last name now, but I must have mentioned it to her back then.  And mom found the listing for his family by the last name and called them, and the woman who answered said that she did have a son named Johnny, but that he was out in the street playing.

My mom explained the situation, said I was a new friend of her son's and asked Johnny's mom if she could go look out in the street see if I was there, and if so ask me to come home since it was getting late. Johnny's mom said no, or that she was busy and couldn't go outside, or something like that.  So my mom looked at the address and drove over, and there I was.

At the time, driving home and hoping I wasn't in trouble, this seemed perfectly normal to me.  It was only years later that I realized what an incredibly lazy bitch Johnny's mom was.  I mean too lazy to walk outside and see if a kid is there, when his mom calls?  What the hell was wrong with the woman?

I don't have any recollection of ever seeing her in person, though I was at Johnny's birthday one year, and stayed overnight there a couple of times, so I must have.  My only faint recollection was that we (Ken and me and other friends of Johnny) used to joke about her taking a bath all the time.  I think Ken was the source of this info.  She was really fat and had some sort of health problem that required a lot of tub time, or something like that.

Johnny's dad was apparently a bit nutty also.  He had a late model Mazda RX-7, which was a mediocre semi-sports car at the time, but it was always in the two car garage.  He drove some other vehicle to work, and just had the RX-7 sitting in the garage all day, saved to drive it around on weekends, I guess.  That's sort of cool, though you'd hope a guy would have a Porsche or something a bit more impressive. The thing with the car was that no one could touch it.  Johnny spoke of even a fingerprint on it being like the end of the world.  The problem was that you had to basically squeeze past it to get into his house via the garage, which was the usual method of entry.   I have no memory of his dad either, just the car.

The dad might have just been a bit anal, I don't really know.  But the thing with the mom is my main example, and my point was that at the time you are a kid, you don't realize how weird your friend's parents are, and tend to not have the ability to evaluate their behavior in any sort of logical, comparative manner.  My mom probably thought I'd immediately grasp that she wasn't mad at me, in light of Johnny's mom's bizarre behavior, but it went completely over my head at the time.

Another example I remember was the psycho mom of another friend, Jason.  He was a screwed up kid I was sort of friends with in about 5th grade, when I was new to San Diego and my mom had just moved there as well.  Jason was tall and unpopular, but not smart or bookish enough to be a nerd.  He was just sort of a loser.  Not good social skills, I guess you'd say. I knew him some in 5th grade and he was a pretty okay friend then, mostly since I was lonely and new to the area.

After I lived in Texas with my dad for a couple of years I returned to San Diego and my mom in 8th grade, and met up with Jason again, in high school.  He was pretty much unchanged, still way taller than average and very skinny, but now he was covered in zits and was pretty much a confirmed loser.  Looked like a nerd, but wasn't smart or bookish or getting good grades.

The thing with him was a desperate need to be with friends after school, since his mom wouldn't let him into the house until she got home.  Literally, he had no key to his own condo; his mom locked it up when she left for work and he left for school in the morning, and he was on his own until she got home from work at 5 or 6 o'clock.  I'm pretty sure that's illegal, come to think of it, but for him it was just the way things were, and I believe they were that way back in 5th grade also; I just never noticed it.  He had a younger sister as well, 4 or 5 years younger than him, and I have no idea what she did after school.  I only remember seeing her, small and blonde, a couple of times, like on weekends. And on the one night I was over there in the evening to watch some TV.

This was in 5th grade, when my mom was trying to not allow me any TV, for my own good.  I of course resented this, but not all that much since I was pretty good about reading and amusing myself in other ways.  But I liked the Dukes or Hazzard, and had watched the show prior to coming to live with her, and all the other kids in school liked it and talked about it. (Hey, we were like 9, too young to realize how stupid and insipid it was.)

One time my mom got the idea that I could go over to Jason's house (which was maybe half a mile from our condo) and watch it with him.  I asked Jason about it, and mom talked on the phone to him to have him ask his mom, and he apparently said it was okay.  Mom had no idea what a fucked up kid with a psycho mom he was, after all.

So the time came to go over and watch it and I rode my bike over there and he was home with his sister.  But his mom was nowhere to be seen. It was oh, 7 or 8 at night, on a weeknight (I think) and he was about 10 and his sister was maybe 7. And they're home, alone, plotting secretly to sneak a friend over into mom's nuthatch house.  I'm sure his mom would never have let me be there when she wasn't, and probably wouldn't have when she was, as later events demonstrated.

My main memory of the night is that the doorbell rang at one point, and Jason and his sister looked terrified, and had me go hide upstairs while they answered it.  It was some guy, I couldn't see down the stairs to see his face, and he wanted to come in and wondered where their mom was.  I don't recall much of the conversation, other than that it went on for at least fifteen minutes, costing me much of my opportunity to see the stupid TV show I was over there to see.

He finally left and pretty much as soon as he did Jason had me take off, probably since he and the sister were spooked by the boyfriend or ex-husband or whoever showing up like that.  And in retrospect, I'm sure they sneaked me in when mom was out one night.

I say that since I remember another time I was hanging around at his house, which meant hanging around outside his house engaging in acts of petty vandalism. We were making little paper boats in some big puddles from a recent rain, and setting them on fire as they floated, that sort of thing.  By the time he was in 8th grade Jason was a raving racist and anti-semite and was spray painting swastikas and such on fences, and making big signs about how evil "Niggers" were.  I assume he heard that sort of thing from mom, but don't know if he ever got over it or moved on in life or how serious he was about it.  I think it was mostly a form of early teenage rebellion.  I certainly don't remember him ever starting shit with anyone of any other race, and I dropped him as a sort of friend in 8th grade largely due to his behavior.  Unfortunately I have no idea if he kept at it or what; I have no memory of talking to him after about 9th grade, though I did see him walking past at school a few times and once by his house when he was on the park basketball court when I was about 16.  Hhe was profoundly clumsy and unathletic and bad at sports, despite being like 6'6", but this time he had a basketball and was with a cute, short girl.  Perhaps even a girlfriend, but I didn't remember ever seeing her at school and I never had any classes with him after 8th grade.

Anyway, that day in 5th grade we were hanging around, riding bikes and such amidst making a mess in puddles, and at one point I was really thirsty and wanted a drink.  I figured this would be nothing; walk into the kitchen and get something from the fridge.  My mom and dad were always very solicitous of other kids, always eager to let me have friends over and treat them well since they knew I was always the new kid in town with the frequent moves since they divorced when I was 7, and they knew I could use the help making and keeping friends. No such luck for Jason.

Not only didn't his mom let him have anyone in the house, she wouldn't even let me into the back patio, and he had me wait at the fence while he went into the condo kitchen and got me a glass of water.  No soda, no juice, just a glass of water.  And while I was waiting and watching I heard his crazy mom say, "Can't he get a drink at his own house?"

I think bringing me a glass of water was the compromise solution, a way to give me a drink while not letting me into or near the house while mom was there. I drank the cool tap water and handed him back the glass and he took it back inside and put it in the sink and came back out and we rode around in the parking lot some more, away from the house as much as possible.

Weird, eh? At least to an adult mind, but as I think back, true to the theme of this entire page, it didn't really mean anything to me at the time.  Looking back I wonder just how fucked up that woman was, what her problem was with not allowing a 10 y/o, the only friend of her miserable, lonely child, into the house for even a drink of water?  A decent mother would invite any friends over and have milk and cookies or whatever, to try and help them like her poor lonely miserable son.  Like my parents did.

But of course Jason's mom being so fucked up was the whole reason he was lonely and miserable and driven to racist acting out in later years, so of course she did the worst thing possible for the situation.  It's sad how there's such a high correlation between awful parents and fucked up kids.  I'm sure there are exceptions in both directions, but most of the time screwed up kids come from screwed up parents, no matter how normal and sane they look while they're crying on the evening news about the massacre their little monster just initiated.

I enjoy this subject and topic, mostly since it lets me write about miserable and weird kids and parents I knew when I was young and miserable and weird, and the subject of the page isn't me.  I'd have more examples, and I can remember a few things, but not so much as you'd think, since my memories of childhood are very poor.

I don't have any concrete memories of any people or school things before about 4th grade.  I vaguely remember the schools I went to 2nd and 3rd grade in, and a few individual events, (one time we got McDonalds at the private school I went to in 2nd grade) but I couldn't name one teacher I had before 8th grade, and I only remember a couple of those since I was in the same high school for 8-12th grade, so I was around the 8th grade ones in later years, which refreshed my memory.

Once in a while I'll see people talking about their 1st grade teacher, like that's guaranteed to be a strong memory you have for life.  Maybe I'm unusual, but I couldn't tell you anything about 1st grade.  Where the school was, what my teacher was named, what we did, who my friends were, etc. Nothing.  I remember a few vague things about 2nd grade, since I was going to a private school that I had to take a bus to, but nothing about the teachers.  Just what the school looked like, and the gym in which we used to play kickball in.  But I have zero memories of kindergarten or 1st grade, and only a few faint bits and pieces of 2-5th grade.  I remember a lot of things about 6th and 7th grade, friends and school layout and activities, but there's not one teacher who stands out in my mind at all; certainly not well enough for me to remember their name.

In fact it's not all that different in high school.  I went to 8th through 12th grade at the same high school (it changed to 9-12 when I was in 10th grade, forcing the kids in the class after me to be the youngest two years in a row), but I couldn't name more than a dozen teachers in total, and most of them would be science teachers that I saw multiple times every year for the whole 5 years, since all of the science classrooms were close together and they all wore white lab coats and stood out from other teachers.

Come to think of it, I could do the same with gym teachers, since I saw most of them several years in a row, running around with other classes.

However the fact that I remember a few of their names is far different than remembering anything they did or said or any way they influenced me.  Most people talk about the inspirational teachers they had in elementary school and junior high and high school, and how they changed and shaped their lives in many ways.  I don't, since I've never had a teacher in my life who stood out to me for much any reason, other than personal quirks or idiosyncrasies. And most of those were in college, when I could deal with them on an equal level, as adults.

I'm not sure if my teachers were just really suck, or it was me who didn't bond or what, but it never happened and that's just the way it was.  I don't regret it, but perhaps that's just because I don't know how wonderful it would have been to have had a really inspirational and motivational teacher who could have given my life some of the direction it so sorely needed, at that young age.

It also occurs to me (non-parent that I am) that much of parenting is a process of reading between the lines in what your children say and what they are thinking, and then using your greater knowledge and understanding to try and influence them without making it obvious that that's what you are doing.

I don't ever recall talking to mom about Jason's mom, or hearing mom talk to him about his home life, but I'm sure that she somehow figured out how fucked up the woman was.  Mom must have then been wondering, "Is she nutty enough to be a danger to my son? And is her insanity serious enough that it outweighs the benefits of letting my son spend time with his only new friend in town?"

The thing with kids is what I'm demonstrating on this page; they can see events that adults will take hidden meanings from, and just not grasp them at all.  I had no idea mom wasn't mad at me that time she was driving me home from Johnny's house, and it never occurred to me that Johnny's mom was such a stupid cow until years later.  At the time it was just something adults were doing, and who can really say what they're thinking or why they're doing it?  Kids don't (generally) have the ability to see through false fronts or see deeper into a situation than the surface.  So for parents it's an art to divine the real nature of events based on what their kids tell them.

I didn't grasp the weirdness or inappropriate nature of lots of the stuff I endured or saw my friend's parents doing when I was a kid, so when/if I talked about it to my parents I would have just reported the events as they transpired, and it would have been up to my parents to read between the lines or analyze things at a level my childish brain couldn't function at.

Unfortunately, lots of parents aren't any good at this.  They can't see when their kids are lying to them, or wrong about something, or they have no judgment.  The overprotective mother of a rotten little bully is a classic example, where she refuses to see what a little shit her son is, while at the same time nurturing his behavior through her parenting techniques.  Crazy dads who live through their kid's sports triumphs are another common example, where the kid just wants to play and have fun while dad is out of his mind with misplaced competitive fury, all deriving from his own life's failures, and is constantly pushing the kid, turning him into a little robot, or making him rebel entirely against any sort of sports.

Those unfortunate cases aside, the problem for normal parents is that they need to figure out what their kids are doing, and if any of their kid's friend's parents are insane, but they can't actually ask the kid about it directly, or tell their kid what they're worrying about. Your kid isn't going to see the weirdness that an adult would, and your kid isn't going to understand that well if you explain subtleties of human behavior to him. So you have to try and moderate your child's behavior with rules and reason and lessons, but not ones that are what you'd use if they were an adult and could see it all for themselves. And at the same time you need to gather information about their friends and their friend's parents, but you can't just ask your kid all about it and get good reasoned answers, or make it so obvious why and what you're asking about, or your kid will mention it to his friend who will mention it to their parent.

It all seems very complicated and troublesome to me, and makes me glad I don't have to worry about that sort of thing myself. At least not yet.  It's almost enough to make me agree with Malaya's child-rearing concepts, ones that are like, "Our kid doesn't need any friends, and if they do have friends we don't want them over at our house since that's a pain in the ass, and we don't want them over at their friend's houses since we can't trust them not to get some idiot's handgun, or be screwed up by their friend's crazy parents."  I'm a lot more liberal about the whole thing, figuring our (hypothetical, future) kids will probably be fine, and that weirdness from their friends and friend's parents will build character, and that the kids need friends and need to grow and go out in the real world and need to have a house with cool parents that they can feel comfortable bringing friends over to hang out at.  We certainly plan on having enough money to build a nice place and build the kids fun stuff to play on and do, while still insisting that they read a lot and learn useful things in school and away from it and learn to be happy and content when they're alone.

After all, both Malaya and me spent a lot of time alone as kids and read a lot and look what happy, well-adjusted adults we turned out to be.  *cough*

February 27, 2004

Next week I'll get to some email feedback, since there have been a number of long and interesting ones lately.  The oddest of them all, and perhaps the oddest I've had since I started doing this site, was from a guy I knew in elementary school and then again in high school.  I hadn't seen or heard from him in at least a dozen years, and had no idea he had given me a thought in those years either, much less that he'd been reading my blog sporadically and agreeing with most of it, as he said to me in email.

The really creepy part, for him as well as me, is that his name is Jason, and he's the one I discussed in such length and with such casual cruelty on the Your Childhood Friend's Weird Parents article page. I hate to even point it out now, but hey, I wrote it under no duress, so I can't pretend to disown it now that the true owner of those memories and life experiences has surfaced.

I should also point out that I make no claim to having been a good person at that age either, and that whatever it might sound like on the article page, I don't hate or even bear any real ill-will towards any of the kids I talk about, or their weird parents, or even my parents for making me as screwed up as I was back then. The page is all about the parents of the kids I knew, not about the kids themselves (I could write a dozen article pages about the minor bad things kids I knew/hung out with did back then, and yes, I was a participant in some of them.)  And I only talked about things the kids did back then if they seemed directly inspired by their parents being fucked up in some way or shape or form, or if they added relevantly to the story.  I knew kids in school who were probably literally insane, in one way or another, but if I didn't know anything about their parents, I didn't mention them or any of the things they did.

Kids who are cruel, including the ones mentioned there (Jason did several really nasty things to me on sort of the spur of the moment, when he didn't think through the likely consequences of the event.) generally are that way since their parents are that way to them.  Like Hannibal said, serial killers aren't born evil, they're made that way through years of systematic abuse.  I don't know any serial killers, but the example holds true for far lesser crimes, or just cruelty.  Cruel and random and ignorant parents make their kids the same way, consciously or otherwise. 

The good news is that Jason seemed to take the stuff on my article page very much in stride, which is a lot more than most people could do when suddenly handed a heaping spoonful of cruelty straight from their miserable childhoods.  He's obviously changed and improved mentally a great deal, which given how unhappy and stuck in a bad family situation as he was, is quite an achievement.  I got the feeling he'd come to terms with things on his own, perhaps with the help of a therapist or maybe a very understanding and compassionate partner (much as Malaya has helped me with a lot of my issues, mostly related to self-loathing), rather than having some amazing epiphany after he read my article page.

I should also point out that I was quite a little fuck back then too, quite angry and antisocial and lonely, and that if my friendship history with Jason should be summed up in short order, it would be that I was the new kid in town in 5th grade and 8th grade, and was a loser due to my lacking social skills and long festering and ignored anger over my parent's divorce.  Jason was burdened with much the same problems for much the same reasons, but he had the extra burden of his mom being more broken by her divorce than my mom was, and having a lot less financial support from her ex-husband than my mom did.  And I enjoyed having him for a friend in 5th grade until I adjusted somewhat and had new friends, at which point I dropped him/we grew apart. And the same thing happened in 8th grade, until I made more/other friends and pretty much dropped him again.  Kids are damn cruel with that sort of thing, aren't they? I recall doing it to 3 or 4 kids when I was in the 5-9th grade range, and having it done to me several times as well.  Junior high and high school really are hell, socially, especially if you're one of the vast majority of kids who have issues and self confidence problems and insecurities and so on. And I certainly did.

Another odd thing is that Jason remembers several things he did with me that I have no memory of at all, including something mean he did that he apologized for in his email.  Meanwhile he doesn't remember a couple of things I talked about and that I was sure were him.  However thinking about it now, I think I might be combining some memories of him with this other guy I knew for a while in 8th grade, Shane.  And that he was actually the one with the spray paint swastika incident, not Jason.

But as I said, the good news is that Jason seems vastly improved in personality and life outlook over how he was way back then.  It's almost enough to give me hope myself.

It would actually be easier of Jason were a white supremacist or psycho or something now, and he sent me death threats, or denied everything on those pages, or if he defended everything weird his mom used to do and said she was the best mother ever, etc.  Then I could just write him off as a kook who was ruined by his unfortunate childhood.  As it is he's overcome most everything, at least as far as I can judge him by a single email (I haven't replied to him yet, since I've been busy with the trip coming up and I haven't entirely decided what I want to say yet.) and seems quite healthy and perhaps even happy as an adult.  Certainly he's happier than he was back then, but that's not saying much for him or me.

I'll probably quote a bit from his mail as it relates to the page and my life, but I doubt I'll say more about his life back then, since it's not really my right or business to talk about his difficult childhood.  And some interesting stuff from other recent emails as well.  Next week.

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