God Bless America: home of the gun-toting child

I feel a rant brewing – a disjointed rant at that, coz there’s a lot of chaos trumpeting inside my head today. I’ve been feeling a rant brewing since yesterday, when I read about the five-year-old boy in Kentucky who shot dead his toddler sister with a .22 calibre rifle his parents bought him as a birthday gift – a rifle marketed at children. It’s called The Cricket. How cute. It even comes in kid-friendly colours and patterns – pink and swirls and everything!

You see, in GodBlessAmericaLand it’s not illegal to give your five-year-old child – who is likely still wearing pull-ups at bedtime, and who can’t yet write in cursive and who likes a bedtime story and Lego and wears light-up shoes on his feet and has training wheels on his bike – a deadly weapon. No sirree. It’s not illegal; in fact, it’s positively encouraged.

But that same five-year-old boy won’t be able to buy a pint until he’s 21, coz it’s illegal. And he may well be attending school in one of the many states that have banned the teaching of Evolution and replaced it with Creationism. And he’s likely living in a district that has banned the Harry Potter series from all public libraries because of the sorcery it promotes.

And that little boy stands up in class every morning on cue, tucks in his seat, looks up at the flag suspended above the blackboard, hand on heart, and pledges his allegiance to the United States of America… One Nation Under God, Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for All.

Justice for all indeed. Just look at places like Detroit, a city with a huge concentration of minority children who can’t receive an education coz the city is closing 50% of its state schools over the next four years. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Coz educating kids in Detroit simply isn’t important in the greatest country on this God-given Earth, especially not if they’re black. They’re American, for fuck’s sake – that’s gift enough!

But it’s not all about jingoism and religious fuckwittery in GodBlessAmericaLand. No sireee. We’re a free country. So much more free than everywhere else – coz we’re allowed to arm our kiddies. Uganda likes to arm kiddies as well – but they’re invisible children – and Hollywood celebs love to speak out about armed children in foreign countries coz it offends every fibre of their plastic-surgery-laden caucasian heads – understandably. It’s only OK to arm a child if you’re American. Remember that. Only if you’re American. Coz we’re great. We’re the best.

We objectify our girlies by encouraging them to wear skimpy costumes and a face full of make-up, parading them at beauty pageants, teaching them to shimmy and shake their arses in front of often middle-aged male judges looking to crown the next Little Miss Thing. 

That same little girlie who we teach to entice onlookers by exuding sexuality on stage will struggle to terminate a pregnancy in the event she gets, GOD forbid, raped by, say, her father or neighbour, coz even a child conceived from rape is a gift from God, apparently. That's what Rick Santorum told Piers Morgan, anyway. And so terminating a pregnancy is impossible in many states coz it's illegal. Still, that girlie can take comfort in the fact that America is a free country, the greatest country on Earth, and life is so much worse everywhere else. Just think, she can even buy her child-born-of-rape a rifle when he or she is five: how cool is that?!

And so, when I read about mass shootings in primary schools in America, and kids killing kids, and poor black children dying from a tooth abscess coz their mum didn’t have health insurance, and when I read about the elderly being dumped on skid row in Los Angeles by hospitals that refuse to treat them, I thank the my lucky stars that I am raising my child in Great Britain. 

LA Times: Five-year-old boy shoots dead his baby sister, click here

Guardian on Kony's child soldiers, click here

Kony 2012, click here

Harry Potter ban, click here

Giving up on poor black kids, click here

Child beauty queen credit here

Rick Santorum says even a child born of rape is a gift from God, click here

Anderson Cooper investigates 'hospital dumping' of homeless, click here

Alcoholism, sodomy and that thing called tough love

It's called tough love. You know – it’s that thing you're suppose to do when someone you love is doing themselves a harm, and you’ve been watching them do themselves a harm for so long you’re now spent. That’s when you’re supposed to do tough love, apparently. When that someone you love, your best friend, is so full of self-loathing he goes to saunas in London’s Vauxhall and participates in group sodomy for the benefit of a baying crowd of often married sodomiser-onlookers waiting to take their bareback turn on your vulnerable friend, who is reeling from a day-long binge consisting of two bottles of Sauvignon, one bottle of Vodka, and the G he took before consenting to get fucked up the ass in an act of self-hatred.

Tough love is the thing you’re supposed to do when your best friend phones you at 3am crying, lost somewhere in the backstreets of Vauxhall, without house keys or a wallet because one of the onlooker-sodomiser-barebackers coerced him into going to an ATM machine to withdraw money to party and then lifted the bank card out his hand as if from a mere toddler, PIN logged in memory, ready to siphon out as much money as he can before the sun rises over Trafalgar.

Tough love is the thing you’re supposed to do when you go to your best friend, the friend you love so dearly, and find a curled-up wretch, covered in bruises yet again, with a sore anus, complaining of diarrhea and bellyache, crying because the dominatrix he is convinced he’s in love with – the one who plies him with copious amounts of Vodka and MDMA and G, and whom offers him a level of sadistic sexual activity that few empathic and self-respecting women could ever muster – is yet again fucking with his head and telling him he must sever all ties with his teenage children if he is to have a relationship with her. 

Tough love is the thing you’re supposed to do when your friend, the friend you love so dearly, phones you in the middle of the night, incoherent and sobbing, and you learn that earlier in the day he was signed off work for three months and told to clean up his act.

Tough love is the thing you’re supposed to do when your friend says he fears that cleaning up his act is an insurmountable task because his gamma levels are out of all proportion, and the chronic diarrhea is impossible to stave off, and the night shakes and tremors make it impossible to sleep, and the only thing that offers solace and quells the shrieking demons inside his head is yet another swig of Stolichnaya.

Tough love is the thing you’re supposed to do when you realise you are spending yet another child-free weekend lying in bed next to your best friend, caressing his sweaty head and scratching his back lightly with your long nails while chatting aimlessly so as to distract him from the chaos trumpeting inside his head.

Tough love is the thing I did last night, when I arranged for my son to sleep over his father’s house so that I could go to my best friend late in the evening with several shopping bags of groceries and possibly coax him into a bath to help wash off the stench of faeces and vomit that has replaced his usual Bulgari aftershave.

Tough love is the thing I did last night, my sharp intake of breath nearly winding me, when stood before me was not the 6ft tall, lanky, blue-eyed high-flying banker with a penchant for risky sex in the toilets at Brown’s that is my best friend, but instead a trembling half-man in soiled boxers, with bruises down the back of his legs and inner thighs, and a cut on his face, and swollen toes with a burgundy hue and missing toenail, and nicotine stains on his rigid fingers, smelling of faeces and vomit, a trail of blood from his sliced toe and chards of broken glass only just visible from beneath the innumerable empty bottles and cigarette packets on the floor.

But this time, rather than mop his brow and hold his hand and scratch his back ever so lightly, I stood, immobilised, in the grip of his embrace, the desperation of his clasped arms around my neck nearly taking my last breath between silent long sobs, listening to him whisper ‘thank you’ in my ear repeatedly and feeling his tears on my shoulder-neck.

And I did the tough love thing at that precise moment, when I stepped back and locked eyes with my best friend, the one whom I love so dearly, and the realisation slapped me, that he will die soon, and that the pain of watching his demise in such a degrading way is more than I can possibly bear following the death of my dad only months ago.

So I abandoned my best friend last night, the one I love so dearly, and turned to leave, tears cascading from my bottom lashes onto the stairwell as I raced down the stairs, my wee heart pounding so hard it would surely break, worrying he may collapse and I won’t be there to mop his brow and caress his head, and that he may die, and I won't be there to hold his hand and tell him I love him. 

Tough love is the thing you’re supposed to do when your best friend refuses to honour the appointment you made for an initial assessment at The Priory Roehampton and you realise there is nothing more you can do but watch him die. Slowly. Painfully. Dishonourably.

Tough love is the thing that makes you feel like a cretinous fucker of a human being for turning your back on your best friend and withdrawing your unconditional love when he is most in need of it. 

NHS - alcohol misuse

Alcoholics Anonymous

Patient.co.uk - liver function, gamma levels

Al-Anon - for families affected by alcoholism

Here's a link to a truly inspiring blogpost, sent to me on 25 February by a single mum fighting her own demons and addiction – Gappy Tales

America – it's not so beautiful

The handful of people who read my modest wee blog may have guessed that I am American – Italian-American, to be exact, in the truest sense of the word. Yup, that’s right. I was raised in the land of big cars, big buildings and big arses.

But I’ve been in wee Blighty some 18 years, so I figure I am in the unique position of understanding both nations and the cultural peculiarities of each better than most people. And I say that without any arrogance whatsoever. I say that as a mere observer.

Much as I’d like to poke fun of my night sweats and hair loss and floppy titties, and lament the tedium of online dating ad infinitum on this here blog, and maybe make one or two of you laugh, I’m not. Not today. I can’t today, coz I have an important something on my mind – the mass murder of 20 children aged six and seven in Sandy Hook primary school in Connecticut.

There will be lots of crying over this, collective sorrow the world over, but not least in the United States of America. And there will be community prayers, and candlelight vigils, and 20 mums in particular buckling in agony, vomiting, unable to breathe and possibly wishing for death themselves on learning that their child is stone-cold dead on the school floor with a bullet through the head. It's more than a parent can bear.

When my son was six, he was building camps in the living room with sheets, clothes pegs and chairs, and learning to play footie and playing with Lego and still watching Pippin the dog in Come Outside and flinging himself on furniture while pretending to expelliarmas me with a twig wand and tablecloth cape. He wasn’t cowering in a corner at school terrified and weeping, whispering my name, with eyes shut and hands clasped, hearing his teacher say ‘I love you all’.

I used to worry about him getting bullied at school, or not eating his packed lunch, not learning cursive, or perhaps wetting himself during PE. I never worried about him going to school and possibly getting his head blown off by a mass murderer. And the reason why that worry never plagued me while I was at work was because he was being educated in England, not in my own GodBlessAmericaLand, home of God, guns and televangelists.

The most devastating aspect of this recent shooting is that soon enough it will happen again, and we will, again, flood Twitter and Facebook with heartfelt comments about the tragedy, and intellectualise about it again on Newsnight and in The Guardian with centre-spreads and many column inches dedicated to understanding the American psyche – just as we are doing this very weekend.

So I’ll give you the nutshell explanation, as an American abroad. Sandy Hook will change nothing in my country because, from a cultural perspective, Americans value the right to bear the arms that can blow off a child’s head more than they value the child whose head has been blown off. It’s our God-given right: it says so in the Second Amendment. The mere suggestion of outlawing guns in the United States threatens our liberty, our deeply held belief that we are a free country. “Oh the land of the free, and the home of the brave…” so go the lyrics. Remember Whitney’s spine-tingling rendition?

American commentators – mostly the God-bothering ones – will say, “It’s not the guns that are bad; it’s bad people who do bad things with guns.” So, make no mistake, in GodBlessAmericaLand guns are good. They’re sexy. They empower women. McDonald’s kiddie parties are soooooooo yesterday. Kiddie parties at gun ranges with real live ammo are de rigueur today. 

Guns are also very lucrative for the American economy: we’ve happily flooded Mexico with Made in America guns, and Afghanistan and Iraq, and countless other dictatorships. It doesn’t really matter that those Made in America guns have killed countless innocent people the world over and at home – peddling guns is a goldmine. Gun-running and pumping up an entire nation of prepubescents with Ritalin help keep our pitiful economy afloat. But I digress…

Charlton Heston once said something like this: “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” And the nation whooped and applauded that pithy public sentiment.

So, on this day, when the world mourns the death of 20 innocent children and six adults in an American primary school bloodbath, Americans can take comfort in the belief that it was God’s will, because God doesn't give us more than we can bear, apparently. Importantly, Americans can feel proud that we, unlike civilised nations the world over, are superior to the rest of the not-so-free world, because we have the Right to Bear Arms. We're cool like that.

I've listened to this song several times this morning - it reminds me of the many sweet moments of my childhood, and of my lovely dad who passed away recently, and of pledging allegiance to God and country by way of a flag. And so, in memory of the 26 victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, I give you Ray Charles singing America The Beautiful.

Credit: The gal and gun pic came from here, much as I hate to credit the site, and the other two were found on Google Images.

Life after death

I am bereft, missing my father so much I may stop breathing. When I close my eyes I can see his gaunt face and sweet eyes searching for mine – that impish slow smirk on recognising my face. I hear his voice calling out to me, calling my name – his gruff baritone voice, at once ominous and soothing.

I miss his lemony scent, and leaning against him on the sofa as he fingered my hair and kissed the top of my head. I miss the feel of his soft lips and prickly moustache on my forehead, the way he’d mispronounce bicycle and his impromptu rants about Mexicans, private healthcare and rubbish collection.

Everyone says grief grips you long after, when you least expect it, when you accept that you will never again hear your Babbo’s baritone voice, or smell his lemony neck, or feel his soft lips and prickly moustache on your face. That’s when the gaping chasm in your heart swallows you whole and you can no longer see for the tears cascading from your eyes onto your keyboard like a dripping tap.

 

So you try to quell the pain by wrapping your lonely arms around your sleeping child, spooning him, weeping quietly into the back of his neck, while he breathes deeply, innocently, knowing that some day you too will inflict upon him the kind of anguish you yourself feel today, and hoping he may have someone in his life who makes his grief slightly more bearable.

There is no God

Death is nothing like it’s portrayed in films. My Babbo wasn’t lying on his back peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones keeping vigil, speaking quietly to one another, caressing his forehead, kissing his palms. Instead, my Babbo was lying on his back anything but peacefully, crying out for the mum who abandoned him many decades earlier, holding me around the head and pulling my face onto his forehead, crying into my hair, begging me for death, vomiting a frothy stream of faeces into a bucket on the side of the bed, soiling himself and apologising for the indignity. Always apologising for the indignity.

Had my Babbo known he’d spend his last breathing days in a state of distress, and anguish, and despair, and agony, and clicking bones, and nappies, and humiliation, he’d have topped himself on first hearing the word ‘terminal’.

There was no bright light at the end of a tunnel for my father, no fluffy clouds, no cherubic faces of those gone before him, welcoming him, no serenity, no bearded man in a kaftan, arms outstretched, calling him home. There was only indignity. And sorrow. And anguish. And agony. And soiled bed linen. And humiliation. And love. There was love. Familial Love. Earthly love. Unconditional love. Accepting. And abundant.

There was no God casting a celestial glow above my suffering father’s deathbed. There was no God, because there is no God.

I am dying, and I want my mum

“Mum, please come get me. Where are you, mum?”

These are the words a man of 80 cries out in his sleep – a man of 80 who was abandoned as a child by his mum. A man of 80 who doesn’t know what it’s like to feel his mum’s warm breath on his neck while she presses her nose behind his ear and takes in his sweet smell of milk and sugar and buttery rolls. A man of 80 who doesn’t know the caress of his mum’s hair on his cheek, who doesn’t know the feeling of his mum’s lips on his forehead, or the feel of his mum’s heart pounding in his ear while she holds him close to her chest and strokes his back ever so tenderly.

It’s what a man of 80 cries out when he’s begging the god of all things merciful to deliver him from the agony that has wrenched his internal organs and made it so he can no longer contain his bowels, and he soils himself and all the bed clothes and floor, leaving behind a trail of liquified faeces as he wobbles his way to the toilet, where he can lock himself away, weeping, pleading for an end to the humiliation that engulfs him.

So shaming is his cancer that he can no longer make eye contact with the ones who love him most, and so he cries out for the one who loved him least. He cries out for her, his mum, in the hope that she may, at long last, come to his side and hold his hand. That she may, at long last, put an end to the pain that consumed him, and tainted him, and wounded him, all his life.

And so, in his last days, while my lovely dad clasps his hands to his chest and slips in and out of drug-induced euphoria, he cries out for his mum, the one who abandoned him, in the hope that she may, just this once, come to him and kiss it better. 

O mio Babbino caro

I used to wonder at my parents' relationship: why they stayed together when all that appeared to keep them together was a thread – and a seemingly frayed one at that.

I used to watch my mum decades ago and wonder about the duty that kept her bound, the obligation that kept her rooted in place, and the role she played without bitter lamentation when, from where I sat, it seemed to warrant at the very least some complaint, some kvetching.

And now, 55 years after my mum and dad first met, my dad is gripped with pain – the kind of pain that keeps him wedged into the corner of the sofa and wrapped in a blanket even though it’s 97 degrees outside. The kind of pain that keeps him awake and taints his every thought. The kind of pain that makes walking a pace seem insurmountable.

And when I find his skeletal self perched against the end of a chair at the kitchen table, sat alone, holding his side and rocking gently, with his eyes closed, and moaning ever so quietly so as not to attract anyone’s attention or, worse still, anyone's pity, I am overcome with sadness.

Love offers solace and makes everything that much brighter. And if we are very lucky in life, we have it in abundance - the kind of love that’s profound, that never wanes, irrespective of distance or circumstance. The kind of love that lives in your core – is visceral. The kind of love that makes your every organ screech and your eyelids burn hot when you lower them, knowing you must accept that which you dearly wish weren't so – that you will lose your dad, your Babbo.

It’s the kind of love that is familiar and warm and constant and safe. The kind of love that smells of lemons and cane sugar, bread rolls and mint. It’s the kind of love you know you can't do without, knowing full well you will eventually be forced to do without it.

And so on that day, the day you accept that you are going to lose your dad, the grief will engulf you like a tsunami of despair, and you will hang your head and weep, unable to formulate a thought or utter a word. And you’ll lay in bed night after night, motionless, unable to sleep from the chaos inside your head and the sorrow pressing your heart, at once deflated and terrified.

And when you see your mum lock eyes with your dad and caress his chemo-stubbled mellon, you’ll suddenly realise you got it pitifully wrong. You will not witness any of the quiet tolerance you were convinced defined their 55 years; rather, you’ll see an impenetrable union being severed, ever so slowly and methodically, by the relentless demon that is cancer.

And you’ll see anguish in your mum’s eyes as she searches your dad’s opaque baby blues for a glimmer of hope where there is none. And you will not be privy to the tender silence between them and their increasing moments of quiet knowing. The growing lump of woe in their throats, pulsating in their clavicle, knows that words are no longer necessary, because they possess, in abundance, the kind of devotion that comes from half a century of loving, unconditionally, the person they promised to keep.

And while you grieve over the crippling demise of the dad you love, and need, and long for, and wish to cuddle, you will be thankful for the not inconsequential mercy that is your mum – a bubbling cauldron of compassion and adoration – for being the one person on this planet of persons able to make your Babbo’s remaining days a little more bearable.

My funny Valentine

It's half term and my son is away on a school trip to France. It's also Valentine's Day, so I sent him a text this morning that said: "Hi Bebby. It's cold without your warm little body to cuddle. Will you be my Valentine?"

His reply was instant, and this is what he wrote: "Maybe". Cheeky little sod!

Valentine's Day is a lot of horseshit, isn't it? I detest contrived gestures, especially of the romantic kind. I can think of nothing worse than being handed an extortionately priced bouquet of roses by a significant other on Valentine's Day. I would rather my significant other give me a handful of wildflowers on a random Sunday in June, for example. That's certainly a more heart-warming gesture and suggests some spontaneity. Some creativity.

My son's father was brilliant at loving gestures: he'd wedge Post-It notes between plates in the kitchen cupboard, and I might find his love notes a week later while dishing up lunch for my son or setting the table for dinner. Or he'd send me on a treasure hunt: I might lift the toilet lid and find a note instructing me to open the fridge door, and then another inside the fridge door sending me to my car, and then one on my steering wheel instructing me to check the oven. 

After laughing my way through the house, I'd find my treasure: a grow-your-own Jesus, a wind-up Nunzilla, and sometimes even a poem. We never celebrated Valentine's Day, in fact: there was no point, because life with him was like one perpetual Valentine's Day - only funnier.

I tried to be as creative as he, but it just didn't come naturally. I once wrote him a long letter telling him how much I loved and appreciated him, how he had changed my life and filled it with joy. I thought I'd slip my letter into his suitcase before he left on a business trip, but when I unzipped his suitcase and slipped the letter between some clothes, I found condoms. I'm allergic to condoms. We never used them. Not once. And so my world came crashing down around my ears.

What Valentine's Day does manage to do rather well is remind all those people like me, who have known love, and lost love, or possibly never had it at all, that there is no one in our lives who thinks enough of us on this official day of love to buy us an extortionately priced bouquet of roses.

ADHD man - a man like no other

He is intoxicating. Addictive.

He'll lock eyes with you as you approach and his face will beam. He'll tell you that you look lovely, and he’ll embrace you. Like a man possessed.

The intensity of his breath on your neck, quick bursts, will make you tingle, and he will have no care that you are both stood on the concourse of London Bridge Station during rush hour. 

He'll romance you in the traditional sense – buy you lingerie, cook you dinner, fill the house with flowers, cuddle you on the floor in front of an open fire, sit in a candlelight bath with you and feed you strawberries. His gestures aren't only grand, they are beautiful. Amorous. He is the Mills & Boon man you didn’t know existed – and he is insatiable. 

He’ll take a keen interest in your work, your life, your child. He'll phone you every night to hear the sound of your voice and tell you he misses cuddling you. He'll text you. He'll make you feel important, significant. And he'll devour you like no one has ever done before him. Your mere presence, the very feel of your skin, will awaken an intensity in ADHD man to rival Burt Lancaster’s passion for Deborah Kerr.

You'll feel beautiful because he'll make you feel beautiful – and wanted. You’ll feel euphoric, because he’ll make you feel euphoric – and desired. He’ll spoon you and tell you in quiet whispers in the dark of night how happy you make him feel, and you’ll feel like the centre of his universe. Electrified. 

He'll show his affections and thoughtfulness by coming over long after your child has gone to sleep, and leaving long before he wakes for school, so as not to upset a prepubescent boy who has never seen his mum in bed with any man other than his dad. 

His ebullience, incessant chat about everything and nothing, ideas that may or may never come to fruition, hilarity, eloquence, magnificent turn of phrase and disorganised organising will captivate you. The vortex that is ADHD man will engulf you, and rather than feel oppressed you’ll feel exhilarated – and thankful.

He is a whirling Dervish of love, lust and adoration - and you will whirl. And whirl some more. And you will sing your body electric.

ADHD man will leave you feeling swept away – and then, when you least expect it, he will leave you. 

INFORMATION ON ADULT ADHD

Adult ADHD - a misunderstood potential

ADHD and Marriage (the comments that readers post are utterly fascinating - a first-hand window into ADHD. This post is about hyperfocus, which can make the recipient feel enraptured)