Deadbeat dad at 21? Many rotten ‘Rotondos’ in our society

On Friday was ‘Madaraka’ Day – and after 18, it is incumbent for everyone, but especially a man, to start showing a measure of self-autonomy.

You know, start making some moves go to college, and live by yourself in a campus room or youth hostel? Later, move to a one-sitter somewhere where, when you yawn and stretch, your hands are on the ceiling, while your legs are out of the door – and your only possessions in the world are a Mekko jiko and a mattress so thin and saggy, it is like you are sleeping on a large slice of soggy bread?

That is the kind of hard scrub living that makes a man out of a boy, and I sincerely believe every guy worth his salt should live like a rat for seven years of their youth — 18 to 25, 19 to 26, 20 to 27, 21 to 28 — but not beyond 30, if one can, taking into account the economy and everything.

The one thing no man should do is be 30 and still living under the same roof (and helping chew the pensions of his parents, who are by now in their 50s, 60s or even 70s).

Take the curious case of Michael Rotondo that was on CNN, other international channels, and went viral on the Internet.

Rotondo is a robust in appearance, red headed bespectacled fellow with a big beard, and a rotund shape with a big belly and red faced complexion that shows he eats and drinks well.

Yet he is now 30, and still living in his childhood home, by force, with his retired parents.

What happened was that lazy Rotondo decided/qualified at 18 after high school to go to one of those ‘aviation’ type community colleges called ‘Onondaga’ (ha, ha) just so he could be a day scholar.

In his First Year, he studied engineering (although when you are at a place called Onondaga, hio ni glorified welding), then switched to ‘Business’ in his second year, then dropped out in third year after he made some woman pregnant, at 21, to become a dead beat dad – living at her parents’ house!

After they threw him out, Michael Rotondo returned home at 22 – and has NEVER left since. To add injury to insult, he has also steadfastly refused to get, or even LOOK, for a job.

‘I am just not good at working,’ Michael Rotondo says.

He is still under the health insurance plan of his parents because ‘filling in all those forms for Obama Care was just too complicated.’

When he turned 25 five years ago, his mother stopped doing his laundry and cooking his meals, as a hint that he was not so welcome to stay at home anymore.

Then when he turned 26, his dad told Rotondo that he couldn’t live in his bedroom any more – so Rotondo moved to the basement of their home – where he still lives, rent free.

At 27, his mom made him a birthday present of USD 1 100 (Sh110,000) as a deposit to get his own place and move out — but Rotondo just blew the money, and pleaded that ‘since I have no job, I wouldn’t be able to make rent.’

By 28, both his father and mother were totally fed up of feeding the large, lazy toddler, living in their basement – and as dependent on them as he had been in 1989 (when he was the age of that Baby Drago fellow whose exploits I enjoy reading on the flip page, lol).

They threatened him with eviction, but like Miguna Miguna, he refused to board the world.

So now they have taken him to court, and a judge recently ordered Rotondo out of the house.

But he immediately filed an appeal ‘as a poor person, since my parents have refused to lend me court fees,’ as he explained, so the two weary-looking New Yorkers are stuck with their Big Baby in the Basement, at least until the appeal is heard, and exhausted.

Go to Buruburu, and you will find a lot of 30-year-old boys – and even a few infants in their 40s, still living with their parents.

Like how do you, at say 38, climb up that double-decker bed you used to sleep in as a child, and the last thing you see before you turn out the light is the Notorious B.I.G poster you stuck there back in 1993, when you were an ‘adole’(scent)?

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