Monday, March 24, 2008

Lots of Thoughts and Not Much Cohesion

I spend every Saturday night tinking or frogging my shawl. I am sick of re-knitting the same rows over again on Sunday. Oddly, I can knit all week and not have any issues and then whatever I knit on Saturday morning or afternoon is wrong. WTF is up with that? I will never finish the shawl at this rate. I feel like I should be done with this shawl by now. Sigh. I sort of would like to just cast on something else, you know just to take the edge off, but that is not the solution. I need to finish this project and then finish another project I have started. I am trying very hard to stay on course so I can get rid of some of my WIPs.

Yesterday was Easter. We did not leave the house. My lovely husband made pecan pancakes for breakfast, mmm; they are one of my favorites. On Friday, it snowed, actually, it pretty much snowed all weekend, but most of it came then. Overall, we received about 7” at my house. It was beautiful. On Saturday we were out and about and the trees were all coated in snow. It will be probably all be gone by the end of this week since they are predicting highs in the 40s all week. Ahhh March.

I recently watched “Gone, Baby, Gone” on DVD. My husband did not want to see it, so I watched it by myself. It was good, but it left me with thoughts in my head that I have to express. Since my hubby did not see it, I can not discuss it with him, so you my dear readers are going to be stuck with my random ramblings. I will be discussing the whole movie, so if you have not seen the movie and do not want to know how it ends, stop reading here. SPOILERS AHEAD! You have been warned.

The movie focuses on a young girl who is kidnapped and the girl’s aunt hires a local P.I. to help find her. The mother is a questionable sort… one character calls her “a crack whore”. She is a drug mule and her and her boyfriend steal money from the drug dealer she hauls for. Her brother finds out and works with some cops to kidnap the girl and frame the drug dealer for it. They make it look like the drug dealer took the kid for revenge and then killed her during the exchange for the money. The drug dealer died as well. The P.I. figures it out and discovers the cop who headed up the task force has the girl. The cop tells the P.I. that the girl is better off with him and his wife and he should not tell anyone what happened. The P.I. states that no matter how many desserts and road trips they give the girl, they are not her parents and it is not their place to decide they are. Plus, he says he does not want a grown woman coming to him and asking him how he could let her stay with people who were not her parents. So, he does call the police and everyone goes to jail, the girl goes back to her mother and the P.I.’s girlfriend dumps him. Perhaps not the happiest ending ever, but somehow appropriate.
Now, this brings up the issue of what is best for children. Would this kid have been better off living with a stable family who love her and dotes on her? Yeah, every kid deserves that, but they deserve it from their parents. If the parents can not provide this, then the system should work so the kid is put in a home that would provide this so the child can say goodbye to their parent. This is not how it always works out of course. I know from experience that it is nearly impossible to get children out of a bad home. But kidnapping a child is never the right thing to do. Eventually, the child will question where they came from. They will want stories of their birth, their infancy etc. How do you deal with birth certificates? Eventually, all children grow up and they need to know who they are. When they figure it out, they will be lost.
This issue was brought up again today when I was listening to the “This American Life” podcast. It was a program called “The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar”. It was very interesting and I highly recommend everyone go onto Itunes and give it a listen. It was about a woman who decided to look into the kidnapping of her grandfather Bobby Dunbar, which occurred when he was 4 years old. He was recovered 8 months later. The “kidnapper” said the kid was not Bobby Dunbar, but rather he belonged to another gal named Julia who had not seen her son in over a year. Neither one of the women who claimed to be the boy’s mother could really id the kid as their child at 1st and the court decided that the boy was the Dunbar boy and that is where he went. This is long before DNA testing existed and the Dunbar’s were a good solid family and Julia was a single mother whose boy was born out of wedlock and who worked as a field hand. So the boy really went to the “better” home.
As the woman kept digging in the past, she talked to the family of Julia and of the “kidnapper”. All of which had different versions of the same story. Eventually, it began to look like perhaps her grandfather had not been Bobby Dunbar. Finally, there were DNA tests done and sure enough, he had been Julia’s son and he had been sent to the wrong home. Now, on the surface, I am sure he went to the better home, but there were repercussions to the decision and the Dunbar’s eventually split up. And the kid himself thought something was askew.
Today, the woman who opened this can of worms was shut out by her family because they did not want to know they were not Dunbar’s. It is fascinating how much we put in to who we are by who we are related to. So at the end of “Gone, Baby, Gone” even though most people would want the kid to be with the better family, you need to step back and think how you feel if you discovered your grandmother had been kidnapped and you did not know who you were really related to.

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