Not the Cure for Jet Lag

It’s gradually sinking in: I have nephews.

It somehow seems unfair that people automatically become my relatives just because I marry someone, but I have discovered that this is the way it works. My wife has a couple of sisters, and both have kids. Her sister became a grandmother at 38, and my wife has been a great aunt since 2020. That makes me a great uncle, which is practically the same thing as a grandfather, so I feel like I should be shopping for a coffin and some Mephisto shoes.

I can’t help feeling that uncle status should involve some kind of participation or consent, but it doesn’t. You marry someone, and BANG, there it is. A label. And an obligation to buy Christmas gifts. I guess.

Rhodah does not have parents any more. It’s terrible that they died young, of course, but I have to admit that it made things easier for me. Rhodah is younger than I am, so it might have been awkward if I had had to butter her parents up. It would feel wrong, currying favor with my father-in-law by taking him to Universal Studios or buying him a skateboard.

Rhodah is helping her sister and brother-in-law move to Lusaka, the capital city I had no idea Zambia had until last year. As a result, they and their 4 sons have had to stay with Rhodah this week.

To imagine what Rhodah is going through, consider some facts. She spent around 12 days in Singapore, 8 time zones away, and then she took a 21-hour trip home on crowded planes. She arrived to a a spotless house and started trying to sleep. A few days later, the Fresh Princes of Lusaka and their parents arrived.

The house is a disaster now. The air conditioner remote is broken. The living room rug, which had just been cleaned, is filthy. Books which had been stored neatly on shelves are lying in random locations. Everything is dirty. And Rhodah has had to share a bed with a nephew who kicks like a mule. Fortunately, that stops. When he gets up at 5 a.m.

I told her this was a great chance to teach them how to clean. Their mother weighs about 35 pounds, so they need to start helping her. I don’t think my suggestion will be implemented.

My mother did not teach my sister or me much of anything about responsibility, so we both became slobs, and my mother did a lot more work than she should have. It’s kind of ironic. She resented her own mother for making her and her sisters clean the house, and she resolved not to teach her daughter to clean. I think I was spared because I was a male. In Kentucky, men didn’t do anything around the house. The women used to stand and serve meals while the men ate, and the women ate later. My mother didn’t want her daughter to be a slave to a husband, but by teaching her to be slovenly, she ended up extending her own servitude.

I was probably around 6 when my mother finally taught me to tie my own shoes. She was mad at me, and she said she couldn’t keep doing it for me. Thing is, she had no reason to be mad at me. I would have done whatever she wanted, but she chose not to teach me, so she got what she deserved.

I now believe kids should be taught to be clean and neat and capable as early as possible. I have no intention of wiping a 5-year-old’s rear end when he can, and should, do it himself. Very young kids can put toys away and throw dirty clothes in hampers. It’s not integral calculus, and it’s pretty obvious that the ability to get things done and look after oneself is a big asset in life.

I think we wait too long to teach kids things. When I was a kid, someone taught me a little bit about multiplication a few years early, and I had no trouble understanding the concept. Then, instead of moving on to greater things, I stagnated until school got around to covering the same material.

I could have been years ahead in math, but no one had the good sense to teach me. I was also taught to read at least three times. My mother taught me when I was very young. Then I went to kindergarten and relearned, using an asinine woke system called ITA which replaced real spelling with moronic leftist letters that had to be unlearned later. Then they taught me real reading again. I remember arguing with the other kids, telling them the real spellings of words were wrong.

I should have been taught real English at age three and then been given a lot of stuff to read.

By waiting to teach me things I was obviously capable of learning, people set me back in life and reinforced my natural laziness, and they also taught me to hate school, which was unbelievably boring.

Now I say beat the little ones until they pick up their toys, and teach them anything their tiny heads can absorb. They will bless you for it later, and if you die while they’re young, they will have strengths that will help them stay afloat.

Some people say kids don’t have enough free time and they need hours and hours to play. Nonsense. What they have is too much after-school status garbage. Your kids should not be doing gymnastics 4 hours a day. They should not be training to be Olympic athletes or practicing the piano until 9 p.m. These things are true. But you don’t bring a kid home from school and just turn him loose with the TV remote and the dirty magazines he knows you hide in your closet. Kids should have to do chores. They should do things for spending money. They shouldn’t just wander around until dinner time, looking for things to set on fire or break.

When I was a kid, my friends and I did healthy things like playing football and various forms of baseball, but we also abused lizards, shot songbirds with BB guns, burned things, took expensive things apart and could not put them back together, made our own fireworks, played with guns, killed fish we could not eat, trespassed, committed acts of vandalism, and wasted our time in other ways. And we were fairly well-behaved by local standards. This is what “unstructured play” really is when parents are lazy and uninvolved.

Spoiling kids is one of the worst forms of neglect.

The concept of the importance of “unstructured play” comes from leftists, so naturally, it’s extremely destructive. When street gangs in New York rape women and beat them to death, it’s unstructured play.

Unstructured play is a symptom of fatherlessness. When you’re a kid and you don’t know what to do with yourself or how to act, it’s because your father has failed you. Fatherless kids go to prison, end up in rehab, die young, and so on. A father is supposed to prevent you from becoming a directionless idiot. Jews have successful children because Jewish fathers are involved. People from my culture are lucky if their kids have jobs at Walmart.

Fatherlessness is an extremely important concept in Christianity, but no one teaches about it correctly.

Anyway, Rhodah will not get any peace until tonight, and she will still have to sleep one night in a dirty house. Then she’ll have to pay to get her rug and car cleaned.

The really funny thing about all this is that Rhodah looks forward to having children. I’m on board, but I believe I have a better understanding of what she is in for than she does.

No point in thinking about it too much. There is nothing that can be done. Raising children will be challenging no matter what. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

I can tell the nephews are a lot of fun. The dirt and disorder don’t change that. It’s too bad they will always be thousands of miles away.

I feel like God is making me a patriarch, which is something I never expected or wanted to be. I have two sisters-in-law, 5 nephews, a niece, and a great-nephew. I have two godchildren. A friend whose dad has abandoned his family has 5 kids who appear to think I’m their grandfather, and one of them is my goddaughter. She sends me funny little texts out of nowhere and tells her family she wants to visit my house again.

My mother’s father was the patriarch in my family. He had the big house everyone ran to for shelter. He helped all of us when we needed it. Now I’m the one with the big house and the tractors and the gun room and the cattle, and sometimes I can be helpful.

There are 5 male grandchildren, and none of the others have taken this role. Two seem to have no interest in helping anyone else. One is a devoted single father but would never do anything for anyone outside his own family. The remaining one is living a normal and profitable life in the financial industry, with a wife and, I believe, two daughters. No one ever thinks of calling him when there’s a problem. He has nothing to do with the family now.

I have this feeling that a patriarch is a tall bald guy with long hair and a white beard, who always knows what to do. I don’t always know what to do. I have made a lot of bad decisions. I have not made any effort to build a family, develop an estate, or become a leader. But here I am.

It’s good to be important to people. I never saw it coming. It beats spending the rest of my life alone, flying around the world on fishing trips or something.

I think some people may come to my funeral!