Day: January 3, 2023

I thought this was an appropriate post for the beginning of the new year. Over the holiday, I heard this from someone one else. I can’t claim it as my own. A teacher walked into her classroom and passed out a paper to each of her students. On the paper was a small black dot. The rest of the paper was blank. She said, this is a quiz. I’d like each of you to write about what you see. After the quiz was over, she read the papers and what each student had written. She addressed the class. She said, “I gave each of you the same task. All of you wrote about the black dot on the page, but no one wrote about the white paper. We do this in life. We tend to focus on the blemish only and not the good that comes from it or all of the positive things that our life has provided. We only focus on what went wrong.” This struck me to want to tell you the good things. The things that no one seemed to want to talk about. I did share a great deal of the good things that happened to me while I was incarcerated. Aside from that, my life has always been pretty good because I have a great family, wonderful husband, I was blessed with beautiful sons and friends that love and believe in me. One of the things that would occur when these boys would stay over, was in the mornings we would make breakfast. I remember this one day in particular with NM woke up and asked if he could cook everyone toads in the hole. I think everyone calls them something different, but it’s basically toast with a hole in the middle of it and an egg cracked in the hole. You cook it until the eggs cooked and then serve them. This gave him so much joy to be able to cook for everyone and show off his cooking skills. DG never seemed to have a girlfriend. One time, he showed up at the house with a blow-up doll. I was embarrassed for him. I didn’t think it was appropriate to bring this, but then it was funny. It was DG. Always the jokester and trying to make everyone laugh. One of the things that SH would do every single time he left was he would stop and say to my husband and I, “thanks for having me over”. This phrase still lingers with me to this day. One of the other things that the DA wanted to try to make an issue out of, was the fact that they all called me “Momma Jods”. I didn’t ask them to, but I suppose it was better than the alternative that NM called his mom which was “The Warden”. When I went to jail/prison anyone younger than me automatically called me Mom, Mommy (which seemed to be a Spanish thing), Momma T, etc. So, this was obviously more a sign of respect rather than calling me Mrs. X. I wasn’t any different to those there than I was with these young gentlemen. I wasn’t serving them alcohol either obviously. One example that occurred while I was at Cambridge was my roommate came in and said that a young girl was looking for me that she had a question. My roommate was shocked because she said, “am I finding out something new about you?” I said, “I’m not sure, it depends on what she wants.” I went out and here she wanted to know who the artist was that sang a particular song. Apparently, It got out that I had a wide genre of music on my tablet. Also, that I was pretty good at naming the title of the song and the artist. I’m sorry if that shocked anyone, but I got this honestly from my parents. They both have/had a love of music. My dad used to get frustrated with me because I knew the words to songs more than my math homework. It was silly things like this though that helped me develop a rapport with other inmates and not get my ass kicked. I believe that these young men also respected me because I respected them and treated them respectfully and didn’t treat them like children. If this is the black dot on my white paper. I’m sorry.

#Teens #Teenagers #TeenDrinking #TeenAlcohol #Parenting #ParentingMistakes #Parenting101