Last night one of my colleagues posted a news item from the British paper Daily Mail on Facebook. I normally ignore this particular colleague's news posts, since they usually have to do with psycho killers, and I have enough trouble sleeping. But this one caught my attention, since the people involved are still alive and in one piece.
Seems there's this 15-year-old girl, Soya Keaveney, in Thornaby, England, who's pregnant with her first child. This sort of thing is not unusual. Happens all the time. Hell, we put that sh*t on television in the States, and eat popcorn while we're watching it. Which might be why this particular family are treating a teenage pregnancy as a career advancement.
Or it might just be that they're thick as bricks. Think about it for a sec – this girl's mother, Janis Keaveney, named her daughter after tofu.
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| I like the sound of that. ~ Fuzheado |
Mrs. Keaveney has two other children – her oldest daughter, Coco, must be named after that gorilla who learned sign language. The next youngest, Ritzy...wait a minute, RITZY?!? RITZY?!? You seriously named your kid that? Like, with a straight face and everything?
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| Are you f&cking kidding me? ~ Nonsequiturlass |
But wait, I spoke too soon, for it gets worse, much worse – turns out little Tofu Keaveney has a twin brother.
His name is Tarot. You know, like the cards. Cause that wouldn't get his ass kicked at school.
But I digress. The sad thing about this story isn't that this mother gave her kids weird names, or even that she's happy about her 15-year-old daughter being pregnant. It may not be the most responsible reaction, but it's still better than chucking her out on the street to fend for herself, like some parents do.
No, the sad things about this story are as follows:
- The family are excited, because now they'll get to move into a bigger council house (that's public housing, for those of you who don't know). That's the first thing you should think of when your teenage girl gets pregnant – sweet, we'll get more welfare benefits!
- The three bedroom house they're currently in is getting claustrophobic, what with Janis Keaveney, Soya Keaveney, the brother, the baby daddy, the two older daughters and one of their babies, too.
Wait a minute – “one of?” Does that mean there's more? Where are they? Who's raising them?
Never mind, I don't wanna know.
- This (stupid, stupid) woman seems to really believe that her 15-year-old CHILD is going to make “a wonderful mother,” despite the fact that the poor dear clearly hasn't seen such a creature in her life. Mrs. Keaveney started tarting up her daughter and sending her out to discos at the age of seven, because a girl is never too young to be sexualized, right??
Too soon? ~ Taurusrus
- Little Tofu (I mean, Soya, sorry) has hired a PR agent, who will be negotiating future media interviews. Cause if you can't be hardworking, talented, clever or rich, it might be enough to be outrageous.
- By the age of 12, Soya was on the Internet, posing in bikinis, and getting “twisted emails from 'strange men,'” according to the Daily Mail. Where any other mother would have called in the troops – or maybe taken down the pictures, geez – Mrs. Keaveney just amped it up a notch. That same year Soya posed for Closer magazine. She told them about how she wants to be a model when she grows up, how she's already dieting, and how she does (or did do, I guess) 200 sit-ups a day because she's “terrified of getting fat.”
Um. You do know that happens with pregnancy, right?
