What would you do for them?????

What would you do for them???

My boys were born in South-East London, in an area that is pretty much famous for off licenses, betting shops, Jamaican barbers and kids stabbing each other to death. Throughout my career of working with adults and children I was more than aware that statistically young black boys or men are more likely to fail within the education system with a good chance of entering the school to prison pipeline. Now, match that with young black boys from a socially deprived area, from a single parent house with an absentee father, the statistics were inevitably stacked against the boys and although not guaranteed, they stood a high chance of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, young, black, no parental input as mother works full time and father absent, failing in school, socially deprived neighbourhood, lack of positive role models and little to no extra curricula activities resulting in a less than bright future in a gang, prison or worse, death. I have seen this happen more times than I should ever have to see and I knew that I would do WHATEVER I could to beat the odds stacked against my children. So to answer the question, “what would I do for them?” My answer is leave everything I know, friends and family and move to another country to offer them a better start in life with more opportunities than London could offer.

Over four years ago I decided to move and move somewhere that the boys could have an equal chance at a great future as any other child their age. Now of course this does not mean that they can’t still make mistakes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. The boys could still make mistakes and in some respects making mistakes is what makes us the people we become, there is no greater teacher than our last mistake, right? But at least here in Germany the risk of me getting a phone call to say they had been stabbed was reduced considerably.

As a parent those are the kind of lengths I will go to in order to protect my children and keep them safe, I also recognise that I was privileged enough to have the means and opportunity to do so, that is not the case for everyone and we all make our own giants leaps out of the box to go to extremes for our children. Now to me whatever is within my means is what I will do for my children, my blood, and my babies. Similar to an animal in the wild ,we will go to any lengths.

I have to remember that not everyone has that same experience. So when my children complain that they have to wait for something I can’t afford and I maybe feel guilty because if I wasn’t a single parent “just maybe” I would be in a better financial situation, I have to remember that actually my babies have it good, and here is why;

“People could never understand what it was like for a 13 year old kid who's own mother told him he is not worth the air he breaths and told the police to take me rather than for her to keep me because she would rather smoke crack and prostitute herself for drugs then be a mother. They were never in a home for kids and seen what I have seen in those "safe" places for troubled kids, or had to live in an abandon house in -10 degrees weather because they had no other place to go. So what was that kid supposed to do just to survive? He went to the only "safe" place around that told him they loved him and would keep him safe. A gang. Only to find out that it was all a lie too and that they only wanted him around for what he could do for them. “

Reading this gave me a little insight into why our children make some of the choices they make in life, but at the same time it hurt every single part of me and I literally felt as if I wanted to cry for that little boy, who by the way is an adult now. I also got really angry. I will never understand why some people have children if they are not prepared to do whatever it takes to protect those innocent lives. I feel like I would literally kill for my babies and then there are some mothers and fathers that don’t even know how to be a parent. None of us do, it is the most difficult thing anyone can undertake, and even harder because it is the one thing you don’t learn in school and there are no books that can help you, but for the majority of us it is almost instinctive to know the very fundamentals to being a parent and yet there are some who still don’t even understand that.