Spoiled rotten

People do the saddest things in the name of love and sometimes it just makes me angry.

The words spoiled child have been perverted into meaning a well loved child who gets showered in love and stuff, but in the end, twenty, thirty, even fifty, or sixty, years later, that child shows what spoiled means. It's like rotten hamburger, or bad steak. People don't want it around.

Worse, bad habits, foisted on innocent children allow them to believe that what they do is okay, or maybe even legendary and funny and somehow cool.

It isn't so.

The woman whose family thought it was cute when she screwed things up, continues to screw things up until she hurts someone, or herself irrevocably. And the man who was a wild child in his teens drinks and smokes himself to a painful early grave.

It's not so exciting when you can't breathe, or walk, and you look ten years older than everyone else your age. You can make excuses, but they don't really change anything.

No one wishes this for their children and yet they give them all the tools they need to do it.

And the worst part is that it is irrevocable. Once you are grown up the only one who can really change you -- is you. No matter how sad your parents might be, or how much they love you, it is out of their hands.

All they have left is the guilt.