“Living for Jesus a life that is true, striving to please him in all that I do..”   Hold on, don’t try to re-enter my URL, you are at the correct blog site, at least I think.  Imagine singing that song while holding hands in a circle with either your fellow middle school male classmates or adult males ranging from their mid twenties to mid fifties.  That right there was my personal hell when I was growing up.  Every Monday from September through May I was forced to attend cadets, basically Boy Scouts for the Dutch without the need to defend a ban on gay leaders because homosexuality was a sin.  As a cadet you engaged in such fun activities as soap carving, knot tying (I still suck at tying knots, which really shouldn’t be that difficult) and leather working, just to name a few.  Every session of cadets was concluded by the entire cadet core gathering in a circle and holding hands while singing “Living for Jesus” all being done in a darkened room.  If you woke me up in the middle of the night and told me to sing “Living for Jesus” even 25 plus years after having sung it, it would be a flawless rendition but for my terrible singing voice (when I sing, my kids tell me to stop).

While Cadets wasn’t always terrible, it was at least 99% of the time.  There was the occasional gym night where we were able to try to hit our most hated counselors in the head playing dodge ball.  As well as trips to see the Harlem globetrotters and to the Hudsonville high school swimming pool, they had a fricken high dive!   However, the only other thing that made it even palatable was the fact that my counselor could do a spot on impersonation of Daffy Duck.  If you can do Daffy Duck there’s no way you can’t make friends and influence people, if I could do Daffy Duck the sky would be the limit.  How hilarious would “I just crapped my pants” be spoken by Daffy Duck?

Why did my parents make me attend Cadets?  My best friend growing up (who was the youngest of five and his parents were really old, well probably chronologically similar to my age with my kids, but they seemed really old back then) never had to go to cadets and he had the misfortune of attending a Christian Reformed Church.  Were they punishing me?  Did they think that someday I would actually need to tie a bowline knot or make my own belt?  Not likely, I’m pretty sure they made me attend cadets because they had to do similarly awful stuff as they had also grown up in the Christian Reformed church.  I realize I make it sound unbearable, and in all reality there are worse religious fates one could suffer, for instance growing up male in the Catholic Church and having a 9 in 10 chance of being molested, but to this day the only thing that I actually have to show for the years of catechism and cadets is my ability to still sing Living for Jesus and that I memorized the first question and answer to the Heidelberg Catechism.  “What is your only Comfort in Life and Death?”  “That I am not my own but belong to my faithful savior Jesus Christ.”  There’s a little more to the actual answer but that’s the Reader’s Digest version.

This beg’s the question, do I need to transfer to a Christian Reformed church so that my kids will be forced to endure the same terrible experiences I had to as a child?  Granted, there are other terrible things that I could inflict on them apart from the Christian Reformed Church, but the way our current society is trending they are unlikely to be options when my kids get a bit older.  First of all, my parents didn’t believe in anything but the bare minimum.  I was provided with socks, underwear, blue jeans, and a shirt on my back.  If I wanted anything beyond that I had to earn it.  My mom acquired a button up turtle neck sweater that she made me wear, she either pulled it out of a lost and found where someone was trying to permanently lose it or purchased it at a very deep discount.  Needless to say, this thing was the opposite of fashionable, I would like to think that it was so hideous it distracted people from my terrible acne and braces, but what it actually did was complete the self esteem crushing trifecta.   Bad skin, bad teeth, and bad fashion.  So, I decided I had better get a JOB if I wanted to overcome my mom’s fashion ineptitude.  In sixth grade I had a paper route, seventh through ninth grade I worked on a celery farm (aka working in the muck) and after that I painted apartments and houses.

Acquiring a job at that age taught me how truly shitty manual labor is but it also instilled a work ethic and built character.   First of all, I can’t envision my two kids even trying to get a job at the age I was able to garner employment and secondly I don’t think anyone is going to want to hire that generation of teenagers.  Millennials are terrible human beings, how bad is the next generation going to be?  Furthermore, there really aren’t that many jobs available to teenagers, as much as I would like to force my kids into working in the muck for at least a week if not an entire summer, most muck farms no longer hire kids, no they have not automated farms yet, but farmers have discovered that migrant workers do a better job and are much more reliable than teenagers.  The thought of my oldest venturing out on his own into the workplace in his teenage years is unimaginable, especially in light of the fact that if he can, he has people do everything for him, including wiping his butt at the ripe age of 6. (He won’t poop at school because he wouldn’t have anyone to wipe for him). I have attempted to implement tough love and tell him repeatedly “I’m not wiping your butt!  You’re on your own!”  However, he is persistent and he just goes into a downward dog pose with his bare ass pointing to the heavens, and repeatedly says “Wipe my butt!  Wipe my butt!”  Eventually I relent, I suppose I could try to wait him out, but there’s only so much I can take.

Two other things stick out to me that were traumatic and impacted me as a person.  First of all, when I was in fifth grade, I signed up for rec league basketball.  This was a bit dicey because it meant that I would be exposed to the public school kids.  I didn’t ride the bus and all my friends were from the christian school, therefore the public school kids were an unknown quantity, did they bite?  Did they use anything but foul language to communicate?  Is it possible that they masturbated even more than I did?  I was about to find out, not about the masturbating thing, no kid in their right mind would admit to that, if only I had known about the 90/10 rule (90 percent of adolescent boys masturbate and the other 10 percent lie about it).   Eventually I stumbled upon an article from James Dobson who was a Christian author, he said jerking off, well he didn’t use that term, but he said it was a okay.  Having known I wasn’t the only one partaking in this act that I thought was an abomination would have saved me countless hours of self loathing,  however that self loathing was never enough to get me to go cold turkey.  In all honesty, it’s the one reason I’m not particularly thrilled about having boys, but weighing that against tampons makes me realize the never ending “dirty” sweat socks are totally worth it.

Back to rec league basketball.  I have noted previously my mom had no fashion sense, back in fifth grade I was relegated to wearing dress sock regardless of what activity I was engaging in.  Looking back I think it’s because it’s such a bitch keeping whites white.  Regardless, I was thrust into the great unknown of public school kids playing basketball in Sunday socks.  WTF Ardis? (that’s my mom’s name, I can use it because there’s no way she knows how to access my blog “I thought I was on WIFI, I don’t know how I used 10 gigs of data this month?”).   She’s on my phone plan and eating through data like a fat kid eats through a piece of cake which is a topic for another blog though.  I am a dick and I think my kids are giant pansies, but I don’t think I can even make them wear Sunday socks when they play sports.  Especially my oldest, he’s got enough obstacles to deal with, I saw that they were doing jump roping in his gym class when I dropped him off 15 minutes late the other day, I asked him that night how it went and if he could do it and he said yes.  He’s full of shit, I’m certain he tripped over the jump rope at least 37 times if he even tried to do it in the first place.  However, there must be some happy medium not quite as extreme as exposing them to ridicule from a bunch of devil worshipers and pagans, something that will make them uncomfortable as well as chip at their self esteem and make them doubt themselves.  Seriously, I don’t want kids with more self esteem and confidence than I had growing up.

My dad also probably has no way of figuring out how to get to my blog even though I provided him with the link, but he did do a number on me growing up.  First of all, I did mention I had a bad case of acne growing up.   He would refer to me as pizza face or claim that if someone squeezed my head it would explode.  On top of that I had the metabolism of a meth addict so no matter what I ate I remained rail thin.  His go to nickname when not insulting me for the my bad skin, which I inherited from him, was bean pole.  The result of all of this torment at the hands of my dad is probably the opposite of what any psychologist would expect, or human being for that matter, You can’t hurt my feelings.  Honestly, it takes a lot to make me feel bad, you can hurl whatever insults you want at me and I am unaffected.  I particularly like it when people refer to my baldness as a way to insult me, I’ve been bald for quite sometime and I had nothing to do with it.  Your’e a fat ass douche bag you can change both of those things.  (not you the reader, typically the person who insults me has a number of qualities that are all brought on by their poor choices in life). I have thrown out minor insults at my kids and playfully made fun of them, however, based upon Shirley’s reaction to this, there’s no way I can come even close to the level of ridiculing my kids that my dad did with me, and to a lesser extent my siblings.  Fortunately for my kids, Shirley can’t be around all the time so I can get some deflating jabs in at them every once in a while, however, they have wizened  up to the point that they now report back to mom when I commit any significant transgressions.  While I am thankful in part to my dad for making me emotionally unbreakable, being supportive  and self affirming, while feeling entirely unnatural growing up in a Dutch household, is much more likely to bare fruit than my dad’s approach.