King Day

I have to go to work today because my company doesn't close for holidays that honors individuals or groups of individuals. So we work King Day, Presidents Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day. We get Christmas Day off, which may or may not qualify as a holiday honoring an individual, depending on your point of view. Our holiday celebrations are limited to those honoring an ideal, such as liberty, sacrifice, gratitude or a strong work ethic. I have no complaint about this policy because overall my company's vacation and other time off practices are very reasonable. It's just that when someone, and she knows who she is, is fast asleep while I get ready for a full day of tedium, I have trouble remembering that it is a reasonable policy. Yesterday, I was inarticulately trying to make the point that instability in children's lives is destructive to their development. Debbie left a comment for me correctly pointing out that lots of kids flourish despite moving a lot. Military families, as well as those employed in the private-sector jobs, such as IBM (I've Been Moved), will attest to her point. My problem is that I always know what I mean, but don't always say or write what I mean. In the case our our granddaughters and the children like Pamela from my third-grade class, the constant moving around is a symptom of much broader problems in their lives. In the case of our girls, the moving is symptomatic of their parent's (or at least their dad's) willingness to subordinate the children's well-being to their own selfish behavior. In Pamela's case there was some issue beyond her parents job requirements that caused her frequent moves. Growing up I moved from city to city ten times, lived in sixteen different houses and went to nine schools by the time I was seventeen. I had the added factor of having parents with profound alcohol problems. My siblings and I have had varying degrees of dysfunction as adults, some readily apparent and some not so obvious. My brother was a drug and alcohol abuser, who went to prison and never really led a productive life. His children are terribly messed up (a technical medical term) and will soon add another dysfunction branch to our scary family tree. My sister dropped out of high school, is an alcoholic and has work at a menial job all her life, content to settle for the least work possible. She was pretty dependent on my father for financial help up to his death. As sad a situation as it is, my younger brother and I are the cream of the crop among the siblings. We have both worked in our same jobs for decades, with the exception of a couple of years when I quit and tried teaching. We sought mediocrity and it is ours (The Sneed Family Motto)! So, I guess in our little family sample group it is fifty-fifty on the question of stability vs. instability in child development. We had half failures and half merely below average. Go figure. Merle. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor