I want you to do something for me, right now.  Ask yourself that question above.  Be honest when you ask and even honester when you answer.

Do you really think you’re in a position to judge me?

Do you really believe that you should be free to treat me differently because of things you think you know about me?

What is it that you think you know about me?

Do you reckon there may actually be more to the story?  Can you believe that there are things about me that you may not know, that may colour what it is you think about me?

Are you able to conceive that these things may be none of your business?  Can you wrap your head around the idea that these things might actually be the basis for what you think about me, yet you may never really know the details of them?

Knowing all of this, are you still satisfied with those thoughts you have of me?  Are you secure in the knowledge that your thoughts about me, good or bad, are based in factual experiences with me and not just things that you think you know but have no real supporting facts behind them?

None of this really matters anyway.  Not to me, at least.  I ask you these questions so that you’ll ask yourself these questions, and not because I want to ask you these questions.

We’ve already moved past that, you and I, even if you didn’t know.

You see, you’ve already told me what you think and how you plan on treating me thusly.  You’ve made it clear who I am to you and how that will affect our relationship.  Me asking you to ask yourself questions is just because I wish for the best in people, not because I’m hopeful it will change anything.

Not to sound too cynical, but I don’t really think this will change anything.

When I left my church at 15, you scorned me and looked powerfully disapproving.  You also softened that look and slapped me on the shoulder, wishing me luck.

When I left my home state for far away at 19, you wished I wouldn’t go so far away and you wanted me to want to stay home.  You also swelled with pride and encouraged me to find my own wings.

When I left my top-notch university for an uncertain place with an uncertain direction, you scratched your heads at me but let me go, most of you never finding me again nor wishing to be found.  You also wished me luck and offered to pack me a lunch on my journey.

When I almost made the biggest mistake of my life, most of you stayed quiet and gave insincere congratulations.  When I dodged that bullet, almost none of you said a thing about that either.

When I made the biggest change of my life, I received scorn and ill feelings, had guilt heaped upon me in mounds and got so many puzzling looks that I wondered if I’d grown a set of tits.  I also got huge hugs, sincere congrats, and proud encouragement from places I’d never expected.

When I was new to a strange place, you treated my new-ness with ambivalence and showed more fear than joy.  You also welcomed me in as if I were returning home instead of finding it for the first time.

When things got hard, you sat back and acted as if you’d have it all sorted if it was your mess, and you still act that way this very day, this very morning.  You also showed me that come hell or high water, you’re going to stick around, by sticking around through hell and high water.

Know how I didn’t want to sound too cynical before?  It’s because I’m not.

It’s not that I don’t have hope that you’ll change, or that reading this will somehow make you think and will somehow affect the relationship that we have.  I don’t really think that.

Because during all that shit I listed out above, at all those stages in my life that I wrote out just now, you did those things because that’s Who You Are, and nothing I did or said to you seemed to make one tiny little fucking difference.

You were going to be that person the whole time.  And you were.

And you’re being them now.

It’s capitalised because it’s a bit of a theme in this life of mine.  What should I do?  The overall structure of society heavily suggests that I need to be one of the hive, dutifully buzzing my way around and protecting the queen.  Getting up in the morning and going away all day, to spend time with people I don’t love (or even like sometimes), to use my time and energy making money for someone else, just so that I can have “security” doesn’t appeal to me.

For the record, we have absolutely NO security.  We’re so broke I actually had to borrow some of the letters to make this very sentence compl

Whoops.  Ran out.  Again.

Honey.  It makes the world go round, or at the very least it makes all the Worker Bees get up in the morning and buzz off to the hive, spending their commute listening to ads for products they should spend their hard-buzzed honey on.  All the while, the days pass and the years pass and none of them seem to notice that they’re not actually going to be queen someday, that there is only one queen and she’s always been queen and goddamit SHE’S never buzzing all goddam day!

By the time they notice… their wings are frayed and the honey isn’t as sweet, though there is a bit more of it than there used to be.  Their little bees are buzzing in their own directions now and, heartbreakingly often, it’s usually along the same paths.  The little bees may not have the best idea of who gave them these “opportunities” nor do they really notice if the honey is sweeter or more prevalent.  They usually only notice when there’s more buzzing at home instead of in a sealed metal box, inching its way toward oblivion.

I saw all of this happening to me, and it bothered the shit out of me.  I was watching it happen though and, like so many other bees before and with me, I let it happen because everybody else was doing it.  There was SOME kind of reward at the end, Special Honey, I was sure of it.  If I just kept plugging away, and was occasionally brilliantly buzztastic, then I’d get that reward.  The queen would notice and everything would change.

But nothing changed.  The days changed, the years changed, even the hives changed, but the situation didn’t, and it was never going to.

So I quit buzzing.

Quit the hive, quit the Death March, quit the Honey Dance and quit buzzing around solely for some nameless, faceless giant royal sloth, who was rolling around in my hard work and did nothing for me other than treat me for exactly what I was: Yet another member of The Hive.

It was hard for a while.  There are lots of flowers out there, but if you’re a bee on your own they’re harder to find and even harder to pollinate.  After a while, you make some other Solo Bee friends and you help each other out, and that’s excellent.

But you still long for more.  Somehow, you still yearn for flowers that are a different colour, growing in a different place.  If you’re me, only the flowers that grow in the countryside will do, for these city flowers are tainted by the daily buzzings of others.  They’re too close to The Hive for my liking.

Also, there is far less honey when you are your own hive.  The little bees still don’t really care, but they’re getting older and they’re starting notice.  Wifebee wears our lack of honey like a pair of wings made of lead.  She doesn’t fly as much these days.

The days pass, as they do, and we make more little bees.  They’re wonderful and bee-autiful, and they fill our hearts with the sweetest of honey, Lovehoney.

The Hive asserts its presence though.  See, even though I’m no longer buzzing for the queen, she still exacts her toll.  My bit of the honeycomb, my spot in the meadow, my most-frequented flowers, they all have a cost.  If I’m not buzzing for her, that cost is harder to pay.

The Queen accepts no such thing as Lovehoney.

Like so many bees before me, I know I’m special.  Somehow my wings are lighter, my stripes brighter, and I struggle to express the feeling inside that I am meant for so much more than just this Hive Life we’re all leading.  It used to be that when I heard other bees saying such things, I would scoff and say something like, “Prove it then!  Go!  Fly!  Stop telling us, SHOW us!”

Stingable as that behaviour was, I had a point.

It’s time I flew.  It’s time I stopped telling and started showing.

BZZZZZ.

I’m posting this picture of him to set the tone.  You see, this is more than just my baby.  He’s… I don’t know how else to say it, but he’s magical.

He’s wonderful and one of the best things that could ever happen to anybody.  He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s interactive and sweet.  He barely, if ever, cries.  No shit.  I’ve heard him cry about once that I can remember.  It’s not that things don’t bother him, they do, but he yells at them or about them and then me or mummy sort them out.  Why cry?  There’s simply no need.

He’s 6 months old now.  Well, nearly, and he’s got two little teeth in the front.  He’s eating solid foods every day now and its better at it every meal.

But you see, his grandparents know nothing of this.

There could be lots of reasons for that.  I’ll get there, don’t worry.

His grandparents live 12 blocks away.  In the same suburb.

They’re not invalids.  They’re not immobile.  They’re not being kept away from him.  They’ve got their own transportation and means.  Neither of them have highly communicable diseases, nor do they hate children.  You see, they’ve had my older 3 children over many times.

In fact, they’ve requested to have the older kids over this weekend.

******

Almost a year ago, my wife and her mother had a “falling out”.  The details are too detailed, so I won’t detail them here.  Suffice to say that there comes a point in a person’s life that they have just had a gutful and they’re not going to take any more, so they don’t.

They haven’t spoken since.

My father-in-law, who is really my wife’s step-father, has approached me at my kids’ school.  We both teach kids how to play chess, and he’s done his hapless farmboy dance before, telling me he doesn’t know what’s up with them crazy womenfolk but he sure misses his grandchildren.

And I do, actually, consider them his grandchildren.  He loves them and they love him, that’s been enough for me.

So, he approached me.  I said, “Well fucking DO something.  Make it clear that the children are a priority.”  So he did.  He asked if they could have them over, made it clear that they missed them.  That was enough.  I sent the older 3 children and they had a great time.

Then my youngest was born.  Things got… weird again.  Briefly.  The older kids’ visits to Nanny & Poppy’s got more frequent and we settled into a comfortable zone.  Wife put aside a lot of the bullshit that gets in the way and offered up an olive branch.  Through me, she asked them if they’d like to have the baby for a few hours.

Nothing heavy, nothing too difficult.  Just a few hours on a weekday so they could experience that beautiful boy.  So they could hear him laugh.  Smell his hair.  Watch the way he watches people’s faces and the way he shapes his mouth when he says, “booooo…”

I rang and said, “Awesome, let’s do it!  One stipulation, keep Teddy away from him.”

Teddy is their Labradoodle (and I can’t believe I’m even writing that word, it’s too goddam funny) and he comes from a difficult background.  To say he is uncouth is too kind.  He’s obnoxious as hell.  He’s a fairly big dog (think proper poodle-sized and Labrador) and he’s ill-mannered.  He jumps on people.  His claws scratch.  He’s hard to control.

I can’t even dream up an alternate universe where a request to keep the ill-mannered dog away from a (then) 4-month old baby while he visits for a few hours.  I didn’t ask for the dog to be tied up.  I didn’t ask for him to be locked away in a closet.  I just asked that they keep him away from my baby, my helpless baby.

And the message I got back was, “Well, I think we’ll leave it for now.”

They didn’t want him.

If it meant that they had to alter their dog-heavy lifestyle, then they weren’t interested.

Well, needless to say, shit blew up.  Wife got mad and texted her stepdad.  I sent emails that went unanswered.  We heard from other family folk that I was perceived as “aggressive”.

So, I wrote a succinct email.  Nothing aggressive, but still pointed.  I told them that they chose a dog… a F*CKING DOG (I didn’t say that part that way) over their beautiful baby grandson.

No reply.

A month passed.  Then a bit.

No reply.

Yesterday, a text asking to have the kids over.  The “older” kids, I assume.

I am drafting an email explaining the fuckery of all of this, but I’m having a hard time with where to go with all of this.  I have no desire to keep the older kids from enjoying their grandparents.  I never want to stand in the way of their relationship, but how do I reconcile people who have such obviously fucked-up values wanting to spend time around some of my kids, but not my baby?

I tell you what.  I look at that picture above, and I can’t think of a thing on this planet that I wouldn’t do to spend time with him if he was my grandchild.

Maybe that’s just me.