Well now that all the good feelings and gratefulness of Thanksgiving is over, we can now move back into anger and recrimination mode.
Here is some snippets of an email from failed parents to their failed adult children.
If i had these folks as neighbors during my early twenties, my parents might have liked me more. Maybe.
Dear All Three
With last evening’s crop of whinges and tidings of more rotten news for which you seem to treat your mother like a cess-pit, I feel it is time to come off my perch.
It is obvious that none of you has the faintest notion of the bitter disappointment each of you has in your own way dished out to us. We are seeing the miserable death throes of the fourth of your collective marriages at the same time we see the advent of a fifth…
Fulfilling careers based on your educations would have helped — but as yet none of you is what I would confidently term properly self-supporting. Which of you, with or without a spouse, can support your families, finance your home and provide a pension for your old age? Each of you is well able to earn a comfortable living and provide for your children, yet each of you has contrived to avoid even moderate achievement. Far from your children being able to rely on your provision, they are faced with needing to survive their introduction to life with you as parents…
He concludes, after noting that the kids have made a series of poor “copulation driven” decisions at key turning points in their lives, with this plea:
I can now tell you that I for one, and I sense Mum feels the same, have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children’s underachievement and domestic ineptitudes. I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a REALISTIC plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about. I don’t want to see your mother burdened any more with your miserable woes — it’s not as if any of the advice she strives to give you has ever been listened to with good grace — far less acted upon. So I ask you to spare her further unhappiness. If you think I have been unfair in what I have said, by all means try to persuade me to change my mind. But you won’t do it by simply whingeing and saying you don’t like it. You’ll have to come up with meaty reasons to demolish my points and build a case for yourself. If that isn’t possible, or you simply can’t be bothered, then I rest my case.
I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed.
Dad
November 26, 2012 at 4:39 am
In all honesty – and it pains me to say this – but my dad's right.
November 26, 2012 at 1:24 pm
Larry, that was funny.
This guy has no one to blame but himself for the way his children have turned out. Children cannot be expected to function as adults if they weren't given the tools to do so. It's good to see that he acknowledges this when you click through to read the whole article.
But still. You'd think being a Navy man, he would have instilled a bit more discipline into his kids.
November 26, 2012 at 2:58 pm
Awesome. I gather that ole Dad has been stewing on this for some time and he finally blew.
November 26, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Wow.
1. So this dad decided to tell his kids off via e-mail? How personal. I'm sure that this isn't indicative of any sort of personal flaws.
2. This guy typed out his message, and he was still unable to fix all the grammar and spelling errors.
3. I would suggest that some blame might belong to the parents if all three children turned out like crap. In the interview included in the full article the dad admits some fault, but he makes no mention of this in his actual interview. He just attacks his children with vitriolic furor. Nice.
4. I can't help but think that his kids are probably pretty disappointed in him too.
It sounds like this family deserves their own reality television show.
November 27, 2012 at 8:28 am
Given he says "mum" and "whinges" instead of "mom" and "whining", he's British. I think the issues involved come into vastly sharper relief once one grasps that important fact, no?
Not that America doesn't have similar problem, but those problems' social/cultural character is different—as different as either is from, say, the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori.
We just think Britain's problems are like ours because we happen to share a common language—which is as stupid as Spain thinking drug cartels are its major national security issue, or Mexico worrying about bombings by the Basque Separatists.