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RE: 🛺💨 Well, I Guess This Is Now A Three-Wheeled School Bus Driver Blog 🚸👨✈️
Tragic indeed, and I've told my wife far too many times how hard we would lay into her grandma for dropping the parenting bar. It's bizarre how direct and open Khmers can be when commenting on one's physical appearance, income, etc., but when it comes to the stuff that actually matters, the culture doesn't permit criticizing like this, which I feel allows more societal and moral decay.
I find it's a common thing here that a woman marries a guy and a has a few children, but because folks often marry too young here and also don't discover themselves until much later in life, these first families/marriages end in divorce or partial separations. All too often the new love/husband refuses to be a stepdad and wants genetic children only, I guess because the thought of mixing new "mini me's" with some other guys kids is just unacceptable.
If our neighbors lived in Kentuckiana, everyone would eventually get choked out within a few weeks for acting the way they do. I'm not a huge fan of my country, but I am glad that we as citizens do hold each other to a certain standard of human decency.
This is probably a common feature of a lot of SE Asia. Virtually every woman I knew in Thailand that was unmarried and in their 30's had a kid tucked away somewhere, normally being taken care of by the grandparents. It is quite rare to encounter a single mom that is actually directly looking after their child/children. I haven't gone out of my way to meet a great many Vietnamese people, but from what I hear it is a similar situation with any single people past their 20's.
I know in Thailand the state does almost nothing to help in these situations but at least there it seems as though a strong family bond kind of makes up for that, which I think is better. However, if you run into a situation like yours, that can be a really bad thing since that girl isn't going to get anything from her family or the state. It's a good thing there are empathetic and kind people like you in the world.
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