Sometimes, in the adoption of older children, I am bumfuddled by their very angry issues. Simple stuff they never learned since they’d never been parented, such as table manners or treating others with kindness and respect.

Kids that have actually been taught to physically fist fight for everything. Someone hit you? Slug them back, an anathema to my own once peaceful existence.

I reply in astonishment, “Do NOT hit anyone back,” as I hear long drawn out explanations that always boil down to, “He/She hit me first.”

“Come tell me, let me deal with it,” I always respond and usually hear in return, “I’m no snitch.”

“Well this isn’t a jailhouse, this is a family. We don’t hit and we learn to apologize,” which goes slap against their very ingrained street mentality.

“Look y’all,” I protest constantly, “street cred doesn’t mean squat here.” Something I’d once heard in my years in the school system, where street credentials were to be admired. Not on my planet buddy.

Kids lash out, they hit without thinking, this I know and understand yet it behooves me to teach them that this isn’t proper behavior for grown folks. I don’t want them out in the work world reacting like disgruntled, bad-mannered toddlers.

This is an uphill battle but it is one I insist upon winning. We’d live in chaos and anarchy otherwise.

Vengeful thinking, rude, playground behavior and disrespect that is unacceptable in society. Just as I have to forgive the children who rage against me, to accept the apologies that always come, sometimes years later and usually in the form of, “Mom, I don’t know what I was thinking, I was acting dumb,” so too must my children learn to forgive slights, unfair behavior and, at times, the lashing out of others.

Let it go, move on, apologize. Forgive each other in order to ever participate in a civilized society. It is almost a mantra that I must constantly stress around here, to remind each child daily what needs to be done, and to teach every moment every single thing that they never learned as they once struggled to survive on the streets.

Photo Credit Cindy Bodie