This was an eventful week. The primary event is that we moved out of our house- but we're not actually out of the state yet. My mom and I are crashing at the apartment of a family from church. I guess I'll call the mom Mary, the son Adolf (not Hitler... though reaching for it), and the daughter Winnie. All those names are similar to their real ones, so. Their uncle(?) also lives there, but you rarely see him.
Winnie can be cute. She usually has little pigtails on the top of her head and has a silly laugh. She really likes me, so she often asks me what I'm doing and stuff and wants me to play with her. Just two days ago, actually, I tried to teach her how to braid. She now knows the basics, but as to actually making her braids good, it's a work in progress.
Her brother, Adolf, is a whole nuther story. He is a little autistic; if any of you have talked with Special Ed kids, you know that sometimes it's difficult to understand what they want to say, and they're sometimes rude and violent. He's one of those rude and violent ones.
And to my horror, the problem's worse than I thought. He uses swear words way too often to be a 9-year old and doesn't respect people. He often doesn't listen to his mom, which in turn means he usually doesn't listen to my mom (even though she's pretty much in charge of him or part of the day), and don't even get me started on whether he listens to me.
Part of the reason is because of the other kids in their neighborhood. Winnie is really nice, so I figured if they played with other kids it was all gonna be nice and dandy like when I was little. But nope.
Okay, I was playing with them and their friends when a (black) group of other kids appeared on another part of the playground. I don't even know when it happened, but our group and their family clashed. A 6-year-old girl kept yelling to Winnie and her friend that they can't tell her what to do (they said they didn't tell her what to do, but even if they did she should do whatever they said because they were older) and she doesn't like when anyone tells her what to do. She seriously threw a rock at Winnie- not a pebble, a rock. Then people from both sides of the line yelled that they would beat each other up if they didn't shut their mouths. All throughout, kids were occasionally using a swear word.
Are you kidding me?!
Since when was childhood like this?! Fighting other kids and being mean and rude?!
It was a little shocking and disappointing to witness this.
In an environment like this, it'd be a surprise if Winnie and Adolf weren't like that.
Especially after Winnie and her friend told me to go beat them up and when the girl was contemplating throwing another rock, I wanted to just stand in the middle of the playground and scream "SHUT UP!" then rant really loud something like: "Guys, you shouldn't swear or fight each other! Girl, you are 6! People are going to tell you what to do for a long time, but you just have to deal with it. Do you listen to your mom? What happened to 'respect your elders?' At this moment we're not telling you what to do, but YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER THAN THAT. You should already know that swearing, fighting, being mean, everything you're doing right now is NOT OKAY. So shut up and leave us alone! At this rate, where do you think you'll go in life?!"
Another thing that scares me about being around here is that I'm around at least one person (namely Adolf) that brings out my bad side. He wrestles, kicks, hits, makes excuses, lies, and holds up his middle finger. I actually liked him the first or two times I was with him, but since then he's insulted me plenty and doesn't have any respect for me at all. Every time I told him to please stop doing something he would yell "You're not the boss of me!" I would retaliate that at the moment I'm the closest to an adult around and am in charge of him so, uh, yeah, I kinda am the boss. Last time, I think he said after something about how his mom said that's not true, but every excuse he makes is really questionable. He loves taking the blame off himself even though everyone knows he's lying.
Which reminds me of a certain girl I had to watch over yesterday.
The stuff left over from the moving sale a few weeks ago was moved to another lady's house and we up a yard sale there. It wasn't much of a success, so I felt bad my mom had to be out there for the whole day just for $70. She told me she honestly felt worse for me because I had to deal with that girl the whole day.
If you saw my post a few days ago where I mentioned a girl that seriously killed someone's pet a few years ago? Yeah, that's her.
Winnie was there too for most of it, so she felt my pain.
There's just not even a good way to describe everything this girl does, but it's so infuriating I was this close to punching her. Hard. Several times.
The thing is that these kids are often not getting much attention from their parents. They're parents are sweet little Hispanic immigrants, but have more than one job and/or a job that has a lot of hours. Thus, the kids rarely see their parents and so they do a lot of stuff to get attention however they possibly can from whoever is available. Even sadder, Mary doesn't try to take advantage of the time she can get with her kids. She talks with her adult friends or yells at her kids instead of just talking with them. It's sad.
Welp. That was quite the optimistic post. So sarcasm, wow. Later I'm gonna do another post for the Faith project, which I haven't worked on in a while.
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