Free Why We Suck by Denis Leary Page A

honor, by smacking my son several times over the course of the last three weeks I was able to discover that he is, in fact, some kind of pain freak.
        Shit-when I was a kid even school wasn't a safe haven. The nuns would whack you with any weapon available-a ruler, a stapler, their hands. I had a nun wallop me across the back of my head one time because I couldn't come up with seven of the ten commandments. She hit me with a Bible. I asked her if thou shalt not hit a kid with the holy book was one of the seven I had missed. The class laughed. She hit me with the Bible again. It was worth the pain.
        Even if the nuns hit you for no good reason your parents always took their side. "They wouldn't be hitting you unless you were doing something wrong! They're nuns fa crissakes! They're married ta God!"
        My mother always took the side of the nuns AND the priests. Of course, my brother Johnny and I didn't really give her any reason to think we were innocent of any given charges. If there was a stupid plan to be hatched-egging the convent or stealing a priest's wallet or drinking the holy wine (I wanted to see if it actually made me act more like Jesus, which-if He was a giggling, sneaky, bumbling mess-it did)-my brother and I were, generally speaking, somehow involved. And once we established that kind of reputation, my mother's trust was pretty much broken beyond resolve.
        It always cracks me up when you see the mom of some guy who's been accused of some horrible crime on the TV news. No matter what the guy may have done or how guilty he may seem there's always one person left on God's green earth who thinks he's not guilty-his mom. Murder, grand theft, fraud-you name it. The guy could be convicted and rotting in jail and after everyone including his wife and kids had given up and decided he was guilty-his mom would always feel the opposite. If O.J.'s mom were still around she would be telling anyone who asked and even those who didn't how her son could never have murdered Nicole.
        Not my mom. Whatever the charges brought happened to be-even if they accused me of assassinating the sitting president-point a camera in my mom's face and the first thing she would say is "he did it." Followed by "And I'll bet if you dig a little deeper you'll find this is just the tip of the goddam iceberg. I'm sure he's got something to do with this whole global warming crap. I wouldn't put anything past this kid. He's trouble with a capital T. I wouldn't be surprised to find out HE was the one who killed O.J.'s wife."
        Most moms I know and have met feel that the women who marry their sons will never measure up to expectations. Not my mom. She couldn't believe I came home with my wife. I think-for the first couple of visits anyway-she thought I was drugging Ann or possibly even blackmailing her. Of course, she's right. Not about the drugging. About the chances that I would have won the heart of a woman as bright, funny and beautiful as my wife. The odds were very much against me. I really had to turn on the charm. And the drugs didn't hurt. I'm kidding. I've often thought if my wife and I ever got divorced, I'd have to fight the courts for visitation rights-to keep my mom from visiting Ann.
        Of course we want our kids to have a better life than we had but in this country things have gotten out of control. My parents were born and raised on farms in County Kerry, Ireland. They literally made the proverbial five-mile trek to school on foot every morning and the same five miles back every afternoon. When my mom told my wife about this my wife asked, "Didn't your dad ever come and pick you up?" My mother said yes, which led my wife to exhale a sigh of relief.
        "He'd come out and meet us in the fields and lift each of us up and give us a hug and then we'd continue on our way home." He came out to LITERALLY just pick them up and spread a little welcome-home love and then he'd continue working in