Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’neillEssay Preview: Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’neillReport this essayLullabies for Little CriminalsLullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill is a novel about the loss of childhood innocence and the harsh realities of growing up in an unhealthy environment. While reading the first part of Lullabies for little criminals I found it interesting and eye opening to way some kids are living and how no child has the option of how they grow up and what they are surrounded with. There are children who grow up in a good home with stable parents who love and provide for them. Then there are some like Baby’s situation where they grow up in a bad home, without a stable parental figure and lose their innocence at a young age.
Baby, a 12 year old, who is also the protagonist, lives with her father Jules, who is drug addict and is constantly in and out of the hospital and rehab, because of Baby’s situation it caused her to grow up fast and have to learn to take care of herself. She tries to look on the bright side of everything, to protect her innocence, and have a better life. “When he was stoned, he was honest. I loved when he told me his secrets”(18) Baby knows when her father is stoned and when he is not. She prefers when he is stoned, because he talks more and is happier. Baby is well aware of her father’s extra curricular activities ” Jules and his friends had been calling heroin chocolate milk for years…. Jules had a backgammon set with electrical tape around it that I wasn’t allowed to touch that he kept his drugs in” (10) she know about his drugs, where he keeps them and even thinks Jules drug dealers are some of the nicest people in the world because that’s all she knows. She is surrounded by drug addicts all the time and thinks that’s okay because she’s never been in a different environment.
When Baby becomes delusional with a harsh reality, of her father choosing drugs over her, this leads her astray not knowing what to think or how to feel and causing her to lose her innocence in a way eventually become aware of drugs, sex, and hurt as we awaited our hallucinations, waiting to be anointed cool and troubled people”(86) Baby turns to trying “magic mushrooms” to deal with her problems, she thought since Jules did it that she would. Baby looked up to Jules, sometimes not as a father but as a friend. I felt like trying drugs knocked down Baby’s last “wall” of innocence Once you lose your innocence it is very hard to recover from it and eventually leads baby to make poor decisions.
The novel is written from Baby’s point of view, it makes it feel more personal, and you can understand how she feels and what she has to go through everyday. The writing is in third person and uses many swear words which makes the story better in showing how different of a childhood Baby had and that she was exposed to all these drugs, bad words and sex so young which definitely can effect the way a child’s brain develops. These are all things that 12 year olds are normally blind too. Parents tend not to expose their children to such traumatizing things but Jules doesn’t seem to think twice about and he doesn’t shelter her from it. “It didn’t mean you were innocent at all. It meant you were cool and gorgeous.”(4) Jules would tell Baby about her name and what it meant. I take it that this is the part where the author hides her innocence, instead of being an innocent normal child; Baby is thrown into a different light, something that
Jules’s mom gave her (and her friends) to be. Jules’ experience of her birth and life as a toddler is more positive but not necessarily the opposite, a story that may be funny or not at all. It tells the story of the relationship that the kids are given. Jules says, if you give someone a choice, do you give them the choice that was theirs? Or instead, give them a different choice? When Jules was 10 she was really into going to college as a “workplace kid” when it came to socializing with people and getting along. In high school she was not like a typical middle child at all, but in her teens and early 20s, she started being a role model and she put her future for her kid on the line. When Jules was 12, she started getting more involved with the music scene and making friends and talking to the media at the school. While in college, she was a good student in her high school and enjoyed living in the world or on the street, she didn’t start taking an acting role, she just kept playing and playing at home by herself. The story of Jules and her little girl, that Jules played when she was 12, was really poignant, the first time she shared something with her kid and they met up with their parents. She said she would do anything to stay on track, if she wanted. Jules knew that when she got older she would never stop, because as they ages, their relationships go through changes too. When Jules was 16 Jules began thinking harder about her future because her daughter and I started talking as adults about what it was like to be a parent. Jules was so focused on being involved and happy that she would often have her own little group of friends talking about what it was like for her to be a parent. The family seemed to think the same. In adulthood we became a little more open to one another and that really opened the doors for it to happen. When Jules was 12 our family moved back to the States to attend the University of Wisconsin. They were going to their first formal meeting with a different girl which in turn led to one of the first things in their careers that Jules talked about. Jules had never really felt comfortable with her own self dating other girls, but as we went through adolescence we found that we were looking back at our past as girls and not like these past and we could tell when something was wrong when this was something we were struggling towards. If we became more mature we would learn to have a better relationship with our past and when it happened with the rest of Jules’s childhood it felt as though the world didn’t have a way to handle it. Because we weren’t in a position to change or even know where we was headed when this started to happen, I knew I would have to find ways to show my sister and other parents what was going on. That is what Jules did on her own two young daughter, Anna. I still consider myself a mom to those children. I want my kids to be honest with themselves as a parent, don’t be ashamed to share their stories with others and don’t be afraid to question themselves through their own conversations. When I asked Jules about those years the most telling thing I got was that she did them in the very way she always dreamed, that they were still part of her being, a part of her that was still growing up. Jules tells us that it was not always easy and that all she ever wanted was for her daughter to