Dear Roger: How To Make Your Parents Heads Explode

The conversations around here have been pretty interesting lately. My son and I have had more in depth conversations about things in the past few days than we have had in months, and I guess that is a good thing. Last night a friend sent me a picture that made me laugh pretty damn hard and my son looked at it and said,"What the hell is that?" I told him that it seemed to be just one of those things that while being part of personality, is also something that is designed to make parents heads explode. I then asked him when he got older and on his own and decided that I had totally fucked up his life and deprived him of so much, how was he going to show me and the world that he was pissed at me? He thought for a while and he said, "Its pretty damn impossible to shock you, you are tatted up like a biker chick, so those are out.You really wouldn't be pissed or upset if I gauged my ears, you would just make fun of me for having,"Ear Vagina's,or Cat Assholes", you would have a mohawk again if I didn't bitch at you constantly about not cutting your hair so I don't even have that.If I brought home a punk girlfriend you would probably like that because my nice, conservative, Christian, girlfriend annoys the hell out of you. I guess I would have to become a preacher." I just stared at him. I guess hes right. And even the preacher thing wouldn't weird me out too badly. Im very difficult to shock and I guess I have set the bar pretty damn high for rebellion and being an asshole kid.
I am tatted up pretty heavily and planning on getting more as soon as I can afford it. I have always dressed to annoy with objectionable t-shirts and either torn jeans or jeans that are too tight. I really went over the top with my social life with my first husband. I still remember peoples reaction to him in the small town I lived in, some would actually edge away from us in the grocery store line and almost no one would talk to us. If we had tried to live there very long, the poor guy would have lost his mind, luckily we went back to Dallas so we could go back to college pretty quickly and he was just another of the herd there, but talk about family scandal.Then, I really did it, I had a kid out of wedlock. Mohawks, tattoos, drinking, weird clothes, bad men, and getting caught drag racing all paled in comparison to that.
I married a guy who was prospecting for the Hells Angels, actually gave birth to a child with Downs Syndrome and then had more kids. That...that right there, wow...you would think that was the biggest of the big deals. Sticky man. The first kid born in the family with a disability. A very visible disability. The kind of disability that freaks people out for some reason because there is no rhyme or reason to it. We had no warning it was coming. All the tests were normal, nothing showed up anywhere. I knew the minute I saw him though, right before I had my first seizure and tried to bleed out and die; I knew he had it by the reaction of the nurse and how his face looked. The reaction of my family later was what was what really sucked though. Sticky spent 10 days in the NICU fighting for his life, he struggled to breathe and to learn to eat and all kinds of things, and I remember my mom coming to see him once and she met the doc who SAVED MY LIFE! the doc whose fingerprints I still had on my stomach from where he had pressed down trying to stop the bleeding, and instead of being nice and kind to him, she was rude. I asked her,"Why?!" and she looked and me and said,"If he was a good doctor he would have told you there was something wrong with him so you could have done something." Those words have echoed in my head for almost 12 years now. Every time I cuddle my now strappingly handsome and extremely popular young man, I hear them. Even if I had known, it wouldn't have made a difference, not that I have a strong opinion on abortion other than its none of my damn business what a woman decides to do with her body, but that I go by the thought that everyday my kids go out into the world, something could happen that could leave them altered. He could have been born perfect and suffered an injury on the way home and been brain damaged, would I have gotten rid of him then? You don't get rid of a kid just because they aren't exactly what you bargained for. All of my kids can be real pains in the ass at times, but I love each of them fiercely and they are my soul reason for life. I look at each of them and see them as human beings that will someday go out into that world and make a mark that I hope they can be proud of, and I know that they haven't had the best of starts and maybe they will bear me some ill will for that. My daughter has spent half her life without a father and the one she has didn't want her and acts like shes an after thhought when hes around, and that worries me because little girls need a daddy. My boys have had more time around him and they didn't do well because of it, with anger and bullying coming out against their sister so strongly that I had to intervene and get them in counseling. My eldest? Hes never had a father. Never had a consistent male role model around to lead him to the right way, but yet, hes my gentleman. His behavior around his girlfriend is old school, courtly. He opens doors for her, serves her first, he reads to her and sings to her and he wont cuss in front of any woman or girl except for me. He is the epitome of a Southern gentleman and I don't know how the hell that was managed. I know I worked hard when he was young to instill those values in him, I just didn't realize they stuck. I am finding out that they did. I hear from my kids teachers and people around them, that my other kids behave the same way. My daughter is unfailingly polite and even curtseys when introduced to a crowd. She is a a bit of a throwback to another time though and I swear she channels my granny with her requirements that her hair and clothes be,'Done" before she goes out, and her love of fancy dresses with hats and gloves. I hope to God her rebellion against me will be to become a debutant and marry some Baylor grad lawyer or something like that, though with her personality and joi de vie, I have a feeling it will be anything but. Speaking of, she just woke up and informed me its "Pajama Reading day at school and she cannot find Jackson's special blanket." I assume this means this is an emergency for me and I have to go.