Family Tree

If you shake my family tree all manners of people would fall out. Educated people & professionals, also crackpots (not to be confused with crackheads) & rum pots. Unfortunately, if you shake one branch of my family tree crackpots and rum pots are all that will fall out. I call it the crazy gene. My Grandmother refers to it as the curse. As a southerner, I'm not ashamed of the rum pots and crackpots. That's what makes being a southerner so great. I myself am admittedly "unstable". We as southerners, have a long history of being proud of our crazy people. We don't hide them away like secrets, we keep them in our homes and let their mothers, sisters or daughters take care of them. I say all this to preface a story. When my husband and I were first, married we thought we would have children and all that stuff like other couples think of. A couple years after we got married we learned that it might be very difficult for us to have children, I was upset and said I would never quit trying. We adopted a perfect little girl though. This little girl was and still is our pride and joy. Two years after that I got pregnant and nine months later our son was born. My son is the exactly the opposite of my little girl. It did not occur to me when I was vowing to create a baby, he may not be "stable" given our families mental history. My son is above average developmentally but it's said that there is a fine line between genius and insanity. My little boy is a body rocker/headbanger. He has bumped in his crib so much, that the screws come out it every couple of days and we have to put them back in. He goes into the refrigerator and takes marinating meat, fish or chicken and takes bites out of it. One day I found him under the dining room table eating applesauce with his hands. I got a glimpse into what could be my possible future. Myself at sixty years old taking care of my 30 year old son. My daughter calls him brother so we call him brother. I would say to family: "Well I can't stay to long at such & such's family function cause if "brother" doesn't get his animal crackers and apple juice, he can be hard to deal with." Crazy people love animal crackers and apple juice. Or another scenario would be, I could bring "brother" with me to the family function but I have to make sure he takes his meds so he doesn't scare the children rocking back and forth like that. With prayer, hopefully none of those scenario's will come true. Hopefully "the crazy gene" or "the curse" will skip him all together and his off the wall activity will dissipate the older that he gets or maybe he will only get a mild case like I did. Either way it goes he's a beautiful boy and I love him to pieces.