Good and decent parents, I honor and respect you. The other kind, not so much. Or even, 'at all.'

This post refers to the kind of parents who put their own selfish desires and habits above the needs of their children. In other words, scum. You good parents, please don’t think this is you. It’s not.

When I was still teaching in the public schools, we teachers would always be especially watchful when the kids got off the buses on Monday morning. Many parents are so wasted over the weekends, more so than usual (if such a thing be possible) that teachers are better able to tell which kids are being victimized in any way, than we are on the other weekday mornings. Other mornings, this kind of parents have had a little time to come down from whatever they were on, that was so much more important than feeding, clothing, or in any way caring for the inconvenient results of their unprotected urges. On Monday mornings, children who haven’t had a square meal since their free lunch the previous Friday get off the bus and run like frenzied antelope to the cafeteria for their free breakfast. They are literally starving. (After a long weekend or vacation, these children are sometimes skeletal.) On Monday mornings, children whose parents always have a fresh pack of cigarettes in their pocket or purse but haven’t got $1.25 for a pair of socks for their child, are often underdressed for the weather, have no coat, and are still wearing last week’s playground dirt on their arms and necks. Sometimes, a child who was wearing a winter coat on Friday, gets off the Monday morning bus in his shirt sleeves, because the winter coat was hocked or sold to get drug (nicotine is a drug) (alcohol is a drug) money for an adult. An ADULT.

Elementary schools in this county had to stop giving free winter coats to shivering coatless children, because the odds of the child coming to school the next day wearing that coat were pretty grim. We once had a mother who actually showed up for a conference wearing the coat we had given to her child. The child was in shirt sleeves.

And I’ll mention once again, but not for the last time, that the majority of these parents (those few of this type that we saw; most of them couldn’t find their child’s school on the best day of their lives. . . .) almost always reeked of tobacco, and had unopened packages of cigarettes on them. And had socks. I don’t know if they were actually clean or not; the stench of other substances generally drowned out any possible afterglow of shower gel or soap. Somehow, I doubt it.

Cigarettes and beer are expensive. You could buy a lot of socks and underpants and shirts for a little child with the money spent on a personal habit, and I really don’t care about your addiction and how you can’t help it, and when you tell me that you deserve a little consideration too, I don’t believe you. You’re an adult. Act like one. Spend the money on your child. You created him; to continue to indulge yourself and neglect your child is so disgusting and reprehensible, I have no adequate words to describe you. “Scum” doesn’t begin to cut it.

Tiny kindergarten children often have the worst vocabularies imaginable. That’s how we learn to talk, you know; we mimic those around us. We all slip up and use words we know we shouldn’t, in front of our children, and we generally regret it when they start echoing us. For most people, it’s not a lifestyle.

But “parents,” it’s not cute when your 5-year-old child uses the ‘F’ word in every other sentence. It’s not cute when YOU use it in a conference, either. In fact, there’s nothing remotely cool about any aspect of you. When you are wearing shoes that are intact, and your child’s shoes are held together with gray duct tape and rubber bands, I honestly despise you. When you tell me about your big-screen TV and your membership in the tavern dance club, and your child is dirty and hungry and dressed in rags, I loathe you. When you stand before me, grinning like a simpleton, your breath smelling like Skank Beer and your teeth coated in slime, and hee-haw about your child’s hifalutin’ desire to brush his teeth every night, I really have to stifle my longing to kill you and bring your child home and feed him and love him and never let him be cold and miserable and unloved and neglected again. You know, like he is whenever he’s with you.

Whut, you cain’t hep it if yer luck hain’t changed in yars? They ain’t wantin’ to give you no more bennyfits cuz you ain’t worked in so long, but you cain’t work cuz yer back, it acts up awful sumtimes? This here county, it’s run by a bunch o’ cheapskates whut don’t wanna give out no more money to you? Yer sister-in-law is wantin’ you-uns to move outen her trailer cuz you ain’t payin’ her no rent? Don’t she know you ain’t got it? @#$+_)^&*, ya know? Them store clerks don’t treat you good about buying them cigarettes even though you pay cash money fer ’em after yer food stamps done bought the baloney? Yer sick o’ movin’ back an forth ‘cross the county line cuz the bennyfits dates change so much. This here skool don’t know nuthin’ ’bout the life you lead, cough cough wheeze wheeze cough wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze and yer tard o’ bein’ treated like dirt.

Golly, I wonder why THAT is.