Thinking about all the things I didn't have when I was a child...

I didn’t have friends or siblings or parents who got shot or stabbed to death.

I didn’t have parents who beat me or any of my siblings, of which I had four.

I didn’t have parents who were drug addicts or alcoholics. In fact, I never saw them drink any alcohol. Ever.

I didn’t have parents in jail.

I didn’t have a father who beat my mother, or vice versa.

I didn’t have parents who couldn’t read.

I didn’t have parents who dropped out of high school.

I didn’t have parents who couldn’t hold down a job.

I didn’t have to walk a gauntlet of gang-bangers to get to school.

I didn’t have siblings who went to jail. (I did have a brother who got caught storing stolen goods for some friends in our garage, but he was never charged.)

I didn’t have parents who let me roam the streets.

I didn’t have people assuming I was a criminal because of the color of my skin.

I didn’t have to go to a school where students had to share textbooks.

I was never pressured to join a gang in order to get protection.

I didn’t have textbooks that had no pictures of people who looked like me.

I didn’t have textbooks that had little to no information about heroes & heroines who looked like me.

I didn’t have a school where you couldn’t play after hours without supervision, and since the budget got cut, there was no supervision and so the playground got closed.

I didn’t have to deal with anything scary no matter how far I had to walk to school. Well, except for a couple of bulls in a pasture. And the chicken slaughterhouse.

I didn’t have to deal with electricity or heat or water being cut off because the bill wasn’t paid.

The cops never came to my home. Well, they did BRING me home one time when I got scraped up falling down into a ravine in a hilly park that I had walked to – two miles from my home.

All the years I was growing up, other than the above, I can’t recall ever SEEING any cops, except the highway patrol.

I didn’t have parents who drove recklessly or drunk.

I didn’t have a parent leave the family. I did have a dad who died relatively young, but I was 28 by then.

I never spent a single day in foster care.

I didn’t have parents who screamed at each other.

I don’t recall ever hearing a single curse word come from my parents’ mouths. The worst I ever heard was my dad’s “DAGNABBIT!”

I didn’t hear the word “bitch” or “fuck” and certainly not “motherfucker” from anyone I ever met - until I was an adult.

I was never a victim of any crime until I was an adult. Ok, one time a neighbor boy was mad at me & so he slashed our rubber wading pool. And then there was the time one of the black boys at school threw me down & tried to take my panties off...and another black boy stopped him and beat him up for that.

I was never bombarded with "music" lyrics that celebrated anti-social behavior.

No celebrities I knew through popular culture were presented as romanticized outlaws because of their bad behavior..

I didn't encounter any tv shows or movies that presented casual sex as the norm.

None of the teen magazines I read had advertising that sexualized young girls. Of course they DID present an impossible-to-achieve beauty ideal, and they DID propagate sexist gender norms, but at least the images weren't borderline kiddie porn.

So many things I never had.

Thank God.