Day Twenty-Four - Something that Makes You Cry

wOh man.

This is a difficult one.

Something that makes your Friendly Neighborhood Oldgirl Cry.

Cry from joy? Or cry from pain?

Joyful crying comes from sitting around joning on folks. DO NOT let me and LadyTee get ANYWHERE and there's some craziness going on. PLEASE. It is not pretty. She can almost keep a straight face. Me, I'm having a conniption fit on the inside, and I may shed a few tears.

Answered prayer makes me cry. I get A LOT of answered prayer. I'm not talking about routine prayers. No crying there, just thankful. I'm talking about big answers that kill 50 birds with one stone. A lot of that is, I dare say, unexpected, or at least manifests in ways my doctorate brain cannot figure out. I still got some traditionalism in me, i.e., I ain't perfect, with my consistently inconsistent self, so why the grace and mercy, Lord? Makes me cry when I work my faith and my faith works out.

But the major thing that makes me cry...

I mean, disturbs me down to the core of my being. . .

Almost to the point where I have to stretch to put it into words, because there are no words to describe how I feel inside concerning it.

Disturbs me down to the seat of my soul, down to the foundation of who I am, my very being. . .

It is when I turn on the evening news, and a woman's kids have been killed by her boyfriend.

DANG MAN THAT HURTS!

Messes me up for a couple of days.

Your man, that trifling joker you were dealing with, who's been giving you problems, has killed your children.

This bothers me because one of my mother's trifling men tried to kill us back in 1976 when I was six years old. I saw a dude pull a butcher knife out of nowhere and just start stabbing.

What. the. world.

You know. I wrote an excruciatingly long post on that. LONG detailed post. Even though it was 35 years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday.

I NEVER link that post. But here's the link -"October 25, 1976: The Accident" .

I ain't recanting that. I'm glad I wrote it, because my Auntie read a related post referring to it, and she called and we talked about it. Cleared up a few things in my mind some 30 years later.

But I tell you, I can be around here cleaning up, yacking on the phone, eating, yelling at that Oldcat Oscar-Tyrone about something, getting ready for work, doing what we all do during our day...

And turn on the news, and some mess like that goes down.

GEEZ! Makes me cry, makes me want to pull what little hair I have out.

Makes me want to punch a frickin hole in the wall! UGH.

You know, I wonder how the woman feels? You have to live with the fact that that fool you were dealing with killed your child.

As a woman, how do you live with such a thing? I don't think I could even sleep at night.

Don't look at me in that tone of voice for saying that.

Check it out: before that joker nutted up like that, there were signs and symptoms of him being crazy. There was mess going on leading up to that.

Well, any crazy jokers I've dealt with, I knew they were crazy long before I uttered the words. . .
"This fool here is crazy."

I've been caught up in some questionable ish. Dated questionable men. The things is, I don't have children.

But all bets are off when you do have children. I'm sorry. You need to watch who you bring around your children.

Me and my siblings. . . We've talked about this. My mother would move derelicts in the house. I mean, negroes with some real problems. We are all quite lucky that we weren't raped, molested, hurt, killed, none of that. Not sure why she didn't see it as important not to move jokers in the house. I wish I could ask her that question. She would cuss me if I did.

I would just like to know.

I think about all these things when a child is murdered, by the "disgruntled boyfriend". I can't stand it.

Of course, it's not always like that. Some mess jumps off, and people are like, "Gee, didn't know he was like that."

But more often than not, you hear on the news "Well, there were restraining orders. He'd been abusing her and the kids for awhile."

WHAT?

Sigh! Come ON!

Children did NOT ask to be born. They did NOT.

I myself have had to come to grips with the fact that I didn't ask to be born. So I won't apologize for such.

Took me awhile to get over seeing my mother being stabbed, and all that blood. Took years for my own stab wounds to disappear. To this day, I can know and understand the sound of a knife stabbing flesh. I don't do too well in movies where folks are wielding knives, man.

To this day my mother still bares the scar on her jaw, where it was sliced open. Her collar bone juts out, from where the dude ran over her with a car. I don't cross paths with her much if I can help it, but I see and think about these things when I see her and I see those reminders of what happen so long ago.

No child should have to go through that. Ever.

And I'm shaken up when a child goes through something like that and survives it. I'm forever emotionally and mentally scarred by that. Lord knows I don't want any child to go through that.
And I cry when I think of a child taking their last breath, their very last breath. . . at the hand of a parent's scorned lover.

Such things. . . they ought not ever happen.

Never. Ever.