Spare the rod, spoil the child

[rexbeccarox]

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(IANMTU)

When I was a kid, I was terribly jealous of another family at church. They were all smart and handsome people. They were really a team and took fantastic rugged adventure type vacations. They worked hard they played hard, and everyone else at church wanted to be like them.


40 years later:

One son is estranged and living with his family at the opposite end of the country. Once a year the mom (dad passed) gets a card from them stating they are OK, and please respect their privacy

One daughter is a raging alcoholic. She is destitute after being decertified in her profession and is to be sentenced for a 4th offense DUI in September, probably going away for quite a while

Another son married, fathered 3 kids, and all the while had a mistress on the side. When his marriage imploded, he married the slut immediately, but to this day denies they had an affair

The last son has had 2 bankruptcies, cheats on a wife who could care less, has started several scam type businesses and POd everyone in his community. He is estranged from his 2 kids, and I don't know what became of them



Damned if I know what went wrong with that bunch. I'd swear the parents put in 110%, and it looked like everything was fine. When the oldest (the estranged son that moved away) came back from college is when the rest of us noticed something was amiss. Probably by 1990, the de-evolution was complete with the daughters first DUI. The family has cousins in the area, they are all, as they say, delightfully ordinary.

Just a big head scratcher as to what went wrong . . .

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I guarantee you things weren't as picture-perfect as they seemed. My dad and stepmom we're really good at making things seem like they were perfect to the outside world, while they emotionally abused us to no end. I remember being a sullen teenager, walking into church with a sour look on my face, and my stepmother pinching the back of my arm until I smiled my biggest, sappiest smile. I disowned my father about a year before he died, and only spoke to him again about a week prior; because he was on his deathbed.