Your Most Important Job Really Does Not End

Raising a child from birth to eighteen costs about $250,000.  College adds another $100,000+.  Obviously we can debate the "hard costs" and the "soft costs" included or absent from that estimate.  We advance our careers, shirk our careers, move, stay, develop and stagnate in pursuit of that child-raising job.

There is a bit of flotsom and jetsom left when they leave.  Original comment: "It's good when the flotsam and jetsam of a child's life contains at least one dead fish, perhaps taken with a boomerang." After checking the definition of "flotsam and jetsam" its' meaning differs a bit from my recollection, more precisely referring to worthless encumbrances, objects of no value representing wasted time and effort. So I'm changing the comment to: "Each of these objects were important, serving real and imagined purposes for a growing child, a developing mind." Of course I'm still pondering the boomerang, inclined to partake in its' departure and return. I'll throw it at a neighbor I don't like.


The refugee situation in the Middle East plays into our general annoyance with immigration despite the fact that we're all immigrants.  Currently the birth rate is 1.8 or 1.9 per woman and the bulk of those children are still young.  Life here, certainly Social Security, is not sustainable without practical and thoughtful immigration.  My mother's family escaped lack of economic opportunity in Norway.  My father's family arrived a couple of generations earlier from Ireland undoubtedly due comparable economic issue although it may have been tied to potatoes.  Both Norway and Ireland are now places many wish to visit strangely just a hundred or two after which people were dying to leave.

Donald Trump has been aggressive in his characterization of immigrants from Mexico while perhaps missing the fact most coming north now are from Central America.  I like to refer to my Norwegian ancestors as whale-killing bastards who left red-haired bastards from Ireland to Italy.  They, too, were criminals and rapists.  Now my relatives are more or less law-abiding.  That's what happens to immigrants.  Most assimilate into the new country.

The stories and images of those attempting escape from the illogical violence in the Middle East are stark.  Europe is attempting to open their doors.  The more controlled countries of the Middle East, like Donald Trump, are fixated on building walls and accepting no immigrants.

I don't want to think about dead children washing up on beaches.  My Facebook post yesterday was as follows:

"Asylum. You have to leave now or be killed. Walk. Carry your children. Nothing else matters. Rely on the compassion of the world's free."

This Friday I'm meeting with my former outplacement consultant.  He's hooked with someone working on Monarch butterfly habitat preservation and wants to integrate more beekeepers into his plan.  I've been a beekeeper for fifty years.  So this week I'll do nothing to save the world's children, other than my own, but perhaps have an impact on butterflies.