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Life in Genoa City

March 10, 2006
by Brent Kellogg

As I so often do I'm sitting behind the keyboard thinking about the people and events in Genoa City. I try so hard to understand why it's always about who's having sex with who this month and which kid as a result of these pairings is trying to find out who their daddy or mommy is. Oddly, these kids never have so urgent a need to know until they're in their late teens.

It seems once the premise has been established that the adult the kid presumes without question is the biological parent, that adult is always quick to say it doesn't matter that the other isn't biological because that person has always been a mother or a father in "all the ways" that matter. To strengthen this notion that it's okay to have sex out of wedlock or during an adulterous affair, family values, like the war or terror, is injected into the mix thereby placing guilt on the questioning kid.

As a kid dumped on his aunt and uncle at the age of two I know whereof I speak. I know that it matters who my biological parents are. My aunt Ruth and Uncle Mark did what they could to raise me right. They sent me to school, put food in my belly and clothes on my back, but the one thing they never could do was show me the love they showed their own kids. They never told me they weren't my real folks and the rest of the family went along with the secret until at age fourteen I found out by accident.

I'd suspected all along something about these people wasn't right. My uncle never did things with me as a dad would, or at least as my friends dad's did. My aunt never took an interest in anything I did and neither of them looked anything like me, or me like them.

I was outraged when I found out the truth and demanded to be allowed to live with my real parents who lived two states away. Aunt and uncle complied and never once tried to discourage me with mindless babble that they were my parents in all the ways that mattered. Aunt Ruth was especially eager to get rid of me now that the jig was up.

That my real parents had to drive in a snow storm to come get me didn't help the situation. From the moment I got into the backseat of their car all they did was bitch. Me, the second of six kids my mother had spawned, had sent their happy lifestyle into a tailspin. A lifestyle I'd later discover that was much like those in Genoa City minus the wealth.

Mom and Dad lived together for convenience. They slept around much like Brad Carlton and Victoria Newman do and with other family members! Dad was doing his daughter's aunt and Mom was doing her niece's father all while preaching family values. The hypocrisy was so intense I couldn't stand it and after six months of living in a hell got out of there.

Unlike Lily Winters' situation and Devon Hamilton's and any number of other teens in Genoa City, bad as my experience was, nobody, including myself, stood around wringing their hands and saying how tragic it all was. I went on to become a well-balanced, functioning member of society, well, almost, and never looked back, except for when paternity issues raise their ugly heads in Sodom and Gomorrahville.

For me, the answer is simple. It's based on what my uncle told me when he suspected I was becoming sexually active.

"Don't have sex with a girl unless you want to marry her," was his golden rule. Adding to that, Uncle Mark told me not to get married unless I was absolutely sure the woman was someone I wanted to live with for the rest of my life.

This June, the 13th, my wife and I will have been married 35 years. This marriage is the first for both of us and none of our children have ever had to ask who their parents are. None of our kids has ever runaway because we forgot their birthday. They have never been in reform school or kicked out of public school or, as far as we know, done drugs or had sex until they were responsible and fully prepared for any "accidents."

Our kids have never threatened to blackmail us, run us down with the SUV, spent the night at the zoo, or sat around drinking expensive lattes at the coffee shop because, frankly, we don't have a Jitter Joint in Oregon City. Our kids don't get expensive gifts on rainy days and holidays or their own credit cards or taken on shopping sprees if they happen to get depressed.

If our kids can live well-adjusted lives, if our marriage can hold together without the need for adulterous sex, if our relatives and neighbors aren't constantly changing sex partners or having a crisis of the week, why can't those people in Genoa City get through one day without thinking about who their parents are or who they'll be having sex with next? Why is life in Genoa City so twisted?