10 Hours in a Waiting Room

10 Hours in a Waiting Room
Kevin Bryant

I was at the hospital over Thanksgiving weekend for the birth of my first grandchild. While in the waiting room, I witnessed a few parental behavioral things that were disturbing to me personally but seem to be pretty common in mainstream America today. The behaviors I witnessed will have a lasting effect on the children & parents involved and not one thing good will come from them.

First was a gathering of 6 or 7 family members huddled together in one section of the waiting room. All were adults but for one small boy who was around 3 years old. This child was a wholly terror. Not only was he running around the room yelling his head off and throwing books and toys around the room, he even had the gall to go up to complete strangers and take their chips, sodas and even went for my cup of coffee. My response was a loud enough to be heard by all, but not too loud “I don’t think so”. It was quite obvious that the mother was stressed out beyond all belief but due to an earlier event, I understand why she did not snatch up the child and bust his rear end.

When I first walked into the waiting room, I witnessed this demon child getting into everything as his mother did her best to keep him under control. About 5 minutes after my arrival, a man walked in and just stood at the doorway for what I guess was about 20 seconds staring at this mom trying her best to control the little spawn from hell and he walks over, yanks the little brat from his mother’s hands and proceeds to reprimand the mother in front of everyone for mistreating HIS son and told her to sit down not to touch him again. His son then went over and slapped his mother, stuck his tongue out at her and started prancing around like “ha ha nothing you can do about it” and the father witnessed it and did nothing. In fact no one in the group said or did anything about it. As he picked his son up and put him on his lap asking him if mommy had mistreated him, I had enough so I got up to go for a walk and on my way out the door I said to no one in particular, my dad would have beat my _____ had I ever treated my mother that way. Way to go DAD, you are doing a wonderful job of teaching your son how to abuse women and have no respect for anyone. I’m sure he’ll fit in just fine in prison when he grows up.

A few hours later I am back in the waiting room and this Hispanic mom and her little girl are in the room. She’s talking to this nice older lady about her being there for her sister to give birth to her first son while this lady was waiting on her great granddaughter to be born. The Hispanic woman can speak English with hardly an accent at all. When she gets done with her conversation, she starts talking to her own about 5 year old daughter in Spanish. For the 20 or so minutes they are in the waiting room, the woman never speaks a single word of English to her own child. Makes you wonder just how hard it is going to be for this child to grow up in an English speaking country and succeed doesn’t it. This is the reason classes in some states are taught solely in Spanish and why we have to press #1 for English.

Thank you God for not making me a witness to the last one but for a couple of minutes. I was on the elevator with a couple of the guys from hospital security heading back to maternity after having ate my supper. When we stepped off the elevator, we heard what I am guessing was supposed to be hip hop music but I couldn’t get passed the base to understand what it actually was. I follow the security guards to the waiting room to find two 15 – 16 year old teenagers sitting in there with speakers hooked up to a laptop and music blaring out as loud as the computer could make it. The security officers were nice in the way they approached the kids and told them they had received several complaints about their music and asked them to turn it off or put headphones on. One blurts out, “ain’t no rent-a-cop gonna tell what to do” when they nicely asked again only this time they included the words ‘call the police” to their request. Again they got some comment back that I don’t really remember. At that time, one of the security guys got on his radio and stated that they were going to require police assistance. Suddenly the little twits had a change of heart and turned the music off. Words were exchanged in very low tone so I didn’t hear what was said but the two teens vacated the waiting room. I’m guessing these gang banger wanna-bees aren’t going to grow up to be up pillars of the community.

As the security guards were leaving I asked how their day was going and the response I got was probably very truthful: “It’s a typical workday”,

As for my daughter, she gave birth at 9:36 pm to a healthy 7 pound, 2 ounce 19 inches long baby girl named Chloe Louise. I still haven’t gotten a cigar.