Dear Roger: Conventional Wisdom for the Unconventional?

My son tells me I am not like other moms. I dont know if that is a good or a bad thing. I tend to be strict about manners and curfew and discipline, but I also support my kids in their pursuits to be themselves. I let them know from an early age that I loved them no matter who they loved, and that we are a live and let love family. We may tease eldest son about his alleged boy crush on Jackson Rathbone, but if that was the real case, we would support him. My kids dont make the,"Eww thats gross!' face one of my friends makes when she sees a gay couple. They just treat them as any other couple. We had to clean up a lot of hate speech out of Stubby and Sticky when they first got up here, but once it was made clear that we dont allow that kind of talk because it hurts feelings, they stopped. Sticky knows words can do damage, he has heard the word.'Retard" so often that he sometimes throws it back at people when they do something he doesn't like. Nothing brings a stop to all activity in a room like a kid with Downs Syndrome asking someone,'What the hell is wrong with you, are you retarded?" He has developed quite the smartassed attitude since he has been up here and he is getting very independent. I encourage that and though its been hard for me, I have been letting him pick his clothes out and even have a say in whats for dinner.

Letting my kids be themselves is important to me. Communicating with them is even more so. My teen son has been dating the same girl for over a year now, and while they are pretty tightly chaperoned and not alone long enough to ever get up to anything, I know what its like to be a teenager and I worry. We have had a very open dialogue about things since he started maturing and though he would rather crawl under a rock and die than talk to me about it, I have sat him down and had an abbreviated version of the talk with him a couple of times,(once due the a very concerning reaction to a Criminal Minds episode), and once when he started dating. I decided that since we had a little bit of time by ourselves on Friday to go to a store where protection was sold, I would give him a lecture with visual aids.

He got that,"deer in the headlights" look as we approached the condom section, but I stopped him and I said,"We need to have a talk and since no one is around and we have a few minutes, im going to explain a few things to you." I then pointed out the things to use, the things that were crap, the reasons for some things, why some things should be replaced regularly, why some things should be avoided, and just general things boys should know. I gave him the talk that a father or a big brother should have given him, but since he has neither he got it from me. He was dying for a few minutes but then to my shock, he started asking questions! We must have stood there for a good 15 minutes discussing things and he even thanked me for clearing up some wrong information he had gotten from his buddies. I told him that my job as a mom was to make sure he was a healthy and happy young man and if explaining things to him that made both of us uncomfortable was part of it, then so be it, its part of the job.

We spent yesterday doing hair cuts. I let the boys choose what kind of hair cuts they wanted and that meant I spent the afternoon cutting mohawks on my sons. They teased my daughter about getting a mohawk and when she proclaimed that,'Girls dont get mohawks!" my son went hunting for the picture of me with mine. Poor daughter is quite the odd child out when it comes to this family. She is a girly girl and dances, sings, has long, pretty blonde hair, aspires to be an actress, ballerina, artist that marries her favorite young man and then takes him to, "France for 6 months and then Japan", while the rest of us are rough around the edges and barely civilized.

Dating...thhpt. I think I am terrible at it. I am not quite sure what I want. I swear and be damned I dont want a man around, but then when there isnt one around I mope. I find myself hungering for human contact and small doses of it just make me want more, like a junkie that just gets a small taste and then cant afford to pay the dealer for a bigger hit. I think I want romance, but then I dont know how to get it or if I even deserve it at this point in the game. All the time I have spent alone made me a harder person, but it made me a hungrier person in many ways. I throw myself into my work and my family to keep myself distracted, perhaps that is the best way to go about things. Who the hell knows?