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All of the love and Christian values in the world couldn’t have made me abled and normal. I survived a stroke at 9 months old that was a unique circumstance due to a series of cascading failures that began when a virus attacked my heart on Super Bowl Sunday in 1998, and my parents were not prepared for how WEIRD that would make me.

My system has said it before and we’ve said it again – you don’t survive a massive fucking stroke and turn out anything close to normal. If we were normal, we’d be dead.

If parents aren’t prepared to raise someone like me with love and kindness and see that kid as a worthy human being in their own right when ALL THE CARDS ARE STACKED AGAINST THEM and THE UNIVERSE SHOOTS THEM WITH AN OUTCOME THAT’S LIKE PLAYING RUSSIAN ROULETTE WITH A BILLION CHAMBERED GUN WITH ONLY ONE CHAMBER LOADED and they get hit with the ONE (1) BULLET IN THAT GUN, then they should NOT have kids. Because short of dying, what happened to me is arguably the worst case scenario for a parent.

I was gravely disabled in some ways from the stroke, but damn near superhumanly gifted in other areas. I nearly starved to death and had to have a G tube placed shortly after the stroke, and it only came out after I was 4, so I missed the typical stage of development when kids learn to eat. I had almost no innate hunger cues. Castor, our first host, became a very picky eater and ate the same thing every day for years. He suffered from very weak joints, which would only get diagnosed 20+ years later as hyper mobility spectrum disorder here in Wisconsin, so he injured himself frequently. He was sick all the time. We had to have a surgery around the time of the G tube placement because we couldn’t keep any food down that prevented us from throwing up, so we lived with horrific abdominal pain for about two decades.

By contrast, we were hyper verbal as fuck. We learned to speak very fluently young and learned to read by 18 months old. So here was this kid with a massive vocabulary by the time he hit kindergarten in horrific pain all the time, and he could and would use it to start verbal sparring matches and be annoying because he was in 8/10 pain, was bored as hell, and had absolutely nothing better to do. It was either that or he was GOING to figure out how to escape from this school during recess jailbreak style and there wasn’t going to be a damn thing you could do about that. So he coped by choosing violence. With everyone. Castor was an asshole. And if you punished him, it didn’t break him, it just made him more determined to fight. He didn’t have a damn thing to lose.

And nobody knew what the fuck to do with him because what do you DO with a four year old like that? What do you do with a six year old, an eight year old, etc.? In hindsight all of the anger we dealt with as a kid seems to fall in line with like..PTSD, which tracks, given everything we went through as a baby and small child, but most people aren’t equipped to deal with a child who’s already handling life like they’ve come back from a war.

And I wish my parents had never had kids because they WEREN’T prepared for that.  Financially, they were. But in every other aspect, they weren’t. My dad tried, being a weird dude himself, and I’ve long since forgiven him for any and all ways in which he failed me because he would actually have a conversation with me about what happened like I was a human being with basic fucking dignity. But my mother and her family weren’t prepared for me, and more to the point, they refuse to see that they did anything wrong by me. So yeah. I’m healing, but that’s just because they’re out of my life and I live thousands of miles away from them. Emotionally and mentally, I had to raise myself in a lot of ways, and then unfuck everything my parents did to me as an adult in EVERY aspect of my life. It’s still a work in progress.

I deserved better.

So many kids deserved better.

And every parent who claims they did right by their kids and yet doesn’t understand why their kids won’t talk to them can disrespectfully go fuck themselves. They’ve probably tried to tell you why a million times. You just wouldn’t listen and decided you were in the right AGAIN.

You don’t get to decide whether you were a good parent or not. Ultimately, that’s up to your kids. And if you couldn’t raise kids who are different than you, queer, or disabled without treating them like shit, you should have never had kids.

Rant over.

-Allēna