I grew up in a small family of 5. My mom was a greedy bitch who spent all of HER money on what SHE wanted. My father busted his ass to bring home maybe 30,000$ a year that supported all of us, including my mother. The best thing that could have happened in my life was the day my parents divorced. The courts gave my dad full custody because my mother didn’t “Feel like” supporting her children. A year later, when my drunken mother mistook me for a person she had a grudge with and beat the shit out of me, I remained with my father while my siblings continued to maintain that my mother was a fabulous person.

But this isn’t about the bitch that would smack me around because I wasn’t tall and pretty like my brother and sister, this is a story about the amazing, magnificent person my father met when I was 13.

M was the best thing that could have happened to my family. My dad was broke and heading towards self destruction, but M made my family a unit again. So even though we were broke, no one begrudged my Stepmother for wanting children of her own. And from the time I was 14-17, my family grew from 5 to 8, with me as the eldest child. Did we have the money? No. But I got a job to help support my siblings, my father worked over 60 hours a week as a carpenter, and when he was home, M would go to work. Eventually, I made it into college, my sister gave the proverbial bird to my father, moved in with my mother, and the family of 8 became a family of 6. Yes, we had wic, and medicaid, but we also worked as hard as we could to remain a family that had food on the table and winter coats, something my fucked up mother could never do for us.

My father cried the day we recieved wic. We all did. It wasn’t that we couldn’t use it, but because M had to stand in line with the same women in our area that had 10 children, 6 in the system and 4 without even knowing who the father could be.

Things are different today, and my father tries to make it up to me, but in my opinion, there is nothing to make up. I respect the hell out of dad and M, because they made it work, and today they are raising one hell of a family. And my sense of work ethic is unheard of among my friends, some of whom don’t even have jobs. If I hadn’t learned early to work for what you need and love, I would be lounging around as well.

So maybe big families with little money isn’t ideal, but it was the lessons behind knowing what family meant to us and what it takes to keep it that made my life what it is now.

I’m not picking a fight, just answering your questions.

I make more than her, I’m a middle manager, if I disappeared tomorrow from this planet, it really wouldn’t harm anything at all, (although hopefully people would miss me.) Middle-management pays well, I own a house, I have a mortgage, I pay $10k/year in interest on that mortgage. And I qualify for a tax deduction for that $10k, and that lowers my taxes $3k-ish. And I don’t feel guilty about taking that on my taxes, everyone would consider me a fool if I didn’t… Do I need that $3k/year, does it keep me starving, would I not have been able to buy a house without it? Nope, not at all. It is nice, but it really isn’t very necessary.

So why is there a stigma on getting food stamps, if someone offered you free money, you’d take it too, right? So why are we standing around blaming people that get food stamps, for getting food stamps? Food stamp recipients are pretty small fry in the big scheme of things. There are plenty of people that made bad choices in life, but we should blame those people for making those specific bad choices in the first place, and not for the fact that they need to eat…

When I was young(like, before I started school and in the summers before I was too young to stay home by myself) my mother worked part time in the morning and early afternoon and my dad worked full time on a swing shift (generally 3pm til 11pm). Dad woke me up in the mornings for bagels and cereal and let me read his computer and hardware magazines that I didn’t understand, and mom fed me dinner, spent evenings with me and put me to bed. Like VA said, it cut down on time spent as a family but my parents didn’t want to put me in childcare and it was a temporary solution. It was a strain but a temporary one.

So it does indeed work.

I worked on having a good, solid marriage and I must have defective kids, ’cause they NEED their father. I mean it. He is vital to their upbringing and well-being. I can’t imagine what they’d be like without him.

As for the justice system, it does still favor men in sexual assaults and abuse. How many child molestors and serial rapists have been released over and over, or let off with a slap on the wrist, so they could commit more crimes? Can you turn on the news just one day and not hear about it? We don’t take crimes against women and children seriously enough.

And medical research definitely favors men. Until a few years ago it wasn’t even known that the symtoms of a heart attack were different for women than men and that’s because every single one of the studies only included male subjects.

And many women can attest to different treatment in emergency rooms. I could go in with my arm hanging off and they’ll ask me, “are you experiencing more stress than usual?” That’s because they seem to think every illness a woman has is mental. My husband could go in with a hangnail and he’ll be meeting with a surgeon an hour later.

I think olb’s point is that he doesn’t know whether your problem is inherently biochemical, or if you got bitten by a big vagina when you were five, or both. Psychiatrists and psychologists are not all that different in that they both do “talking” therapy, but psychiatrists are M.D.’s who can prescribe medication.

Frankly, I don’t think either would do much good. Sometimes hatin’ just feels too damned good, right doc?

“Chances are, pretty much anyone can, and would be treated as “second class” citizen, unless they were in the top 5 percentile of the world.”

You don’t know much about the world. If you have a million dollars, you are in the top one percent of the world in terms of wealth. And each of these set of parents spent $1 million apiece on their boys defenses.

Besides, rich people are not treated better than poor people by the law. Yes, they can afford better lawyers, but they are also more prone to be sued in civil suits.

Exactly, not from single parents, but from the society they lived in.

“I am sorry, what class were the boys from Duke in, and what class was their psychotic stripper accuser in?”

They’d be in the upper-middle at best, not upper class. Again, you’re missing the point. Chances are, pretty much anyone can, and would be treated as “second class” citizen, unless they were in the top 5 percentile of the world.

“I wrote 70% and you write it is only women.”

Only thing you wrote that was 70% was in regards to people being born to single mothers in black families. Also, that does not change the fact that you started calling me a “mangina” for disagreeing with your position that females have castrated the males. Find me a spot where I was endorsing feminazism. I have never said females are superior.

I believe I know how you are as well, doc. You’re feeling close to castration or are probably naturally castrated. You feel the need to lash out and be defensive because of that. Guess what? You’re just like 99% of the other “activists” out there, screaming their heads off and wanting others to change things but not willing to try to make the changes themselves, or do so in a calm manner.