Step Kids

I have step kids. Step kids are fun, if you enjoy correcting other people’s mistakes. I have two. My youngest stepson has 79 tattoos, most of them covering his arms and his hands, effectively eliminating 98 percent of the jobs in this world. Oh, but it’s OK because he’s gong to become a rock star. Soon he’s going to learn to play an instrument. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I like the way the human body looks without tattoos. I also have trouble understanding how people trust individuals they would never allow into their home, to permanently mark their bodies.
Not only do I not have any tattoos, I also have no body piercings. Something else I don’t quite understand. I see fifteen-year-old kids coming home with their tongues pierced.
I’m sure every Dad looks forward to the day his daughter comes home with her tongue pierced, and says “Hey dad! I’ve got a hobby!” Now I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If I was fifteen years old and I strolled into the house with my tongue pierced, my mother would have ripped it out faster than a fisherman taking a daredevil lure out of a small-mouthed bass.
I don’t get things. I feel sorry for prostitutes. How are they supposed to dress to distinguish themselves from 10th graders? “How much?….Oops! I didn’t see your lunch box….No, I like Justin Bieber too. My bad!”
I don’t know how you discipline kids these days. I had to baby sit the other day. My niece is six years old and she handed me a bedtime story to read to her. It was a book I had heard of but never actually read. Now maybe I should have read this book quietly to myself before I read it out loud. It was the story of Hansel and Gretel. For those of you who don’t remember it, what a cheerful little bedtime story this is. Hansel and Gretel is the happy tale of two children whose father leaves them in a dark forest to die, somewhere in Germany. As they desperately try to find their way home, they get captured by an evil witch who decides to eat them. But not right away. First she had to fatten them up in a cage. So the two children, out of self-defense, break out of the cage, and kill the witch, by pushing her into a fiery oven. Pleasant dreams!! Wow! If they made a new version of this tale, maybe the witch could tattoo and body pierce them?