Dear Roger: Having Kids Will Make You Crazy

I think I am evidence enough of that, but last night was one of those moments when I have to wonder, are some of those,"Missing" people simply parents who had a moment where they looked at what their formerly sweet little bundle of joy had done, realized that it was just too much for their sanity to handle, walked to the door, opened it, stepped out, started walking and just kept on going?
Child rearing is not for pussies. Yes, that is crass, forgive me. I spent a great part of last night scooping shit out of a commode so it didn't spew up at me as I attempted,(in vain), to plunge it down so the ONE toilet in our apartment would resume functioning after Sticky had, once again flushed something not meant to be flushed and then Stubby had seen fit to deposit a huge poop in it right afterwards. Couldn't find the number for the after hours maintenance, and didn't want to call them anyway because, obviously it was my kids fault and I cant afford the call out fee. When the plunger broke, I may have actually invented some new curse words. I ended up calling my eldest son who was at his girlfriends birthday party, and asked him to please find a plunger to bring home with him when he returned.
He showed up about an hour later with a plunger, and though he has a vastly weaker stomach than me, he bravely went in and began trying to help. Between the two of us, we began to work on clearing it and after about a half hour we had it sort of functioning again. I am still going to have to have the maintenance guy either loan me the pipe snake or come in and snake it for us to pull out whatever was dropped down there. This wasn't the first time this has happened.Sticky is a notorious toilet killer. He used to flush things like Superballs and because they are exactly the perfect size to fit into the bed in the bowl, that was death to the entire commode and meant replacement. He also killed cell phones, flash lights, key fobs to fancy keys that cost a couple hundred bucks to replace,his fathers lighters, tobacco(both kinds), and whatever else he encountered laying around. Hes not alone in this hobby, kids seem to get off on it and I have heard other friends horror stories about things their kids have flushed, up to and including, money into the hundreds of dollars, jewelry and so on. Forget having cool stuff when you have kids. You have kids now, that's your,"Cool Stuff" I guess is what they are trying to say.
My small daughter has caused her fair share of insanity inducing moments as well. She had the nickname,"Killer" when she was a toddler. She was hell on things like electronics, breakables, and fish, especially my eldest sons pet gold fish that he had managed to grow to a freakishly huge size of over 8 inches! It was a cool fish that would come up to the front of the tank and even interact with you, until daughter dumped an entire can of fish food into his tank not once, but twice. She unplugged the heater for his lizards terrarium, and then to add to the fun, she dumped an entire glass of sweet tea on one of my laptop computers, knocked over a ceramic bowl of mine, sending it smashing to the floor into shrapnel, but the worst of all her insanity inducing behaviors was the fact that she was a flight risk. She walked away from a baby sitter that my ex had dropped her off at right before he was arrested for taking a straight razor to me. She was missing for several hours out in an area of Flagstaff that was just full of stock tanks, large dogs, horses, registered sex offenders,abandoned mines and caves. She was around 2 years old and a cute little curly blonde haired baby girl that could have easily vanished forever, but a Mexican woodcutter who had found me in the middle of the road hysterically stopping people begging for help finding her,had gone and searched with his wife until they had found her wandering along the side of the road they said looking up at nothing but talking away to someone. The Mexican man was convinced she was talking to her guardian angel. I'm not ashamed to say I gave thanks to God, that angel that Mexican family and the sheriffs deputy who stopped me from beating the hair off the baby sitter when I got back to her house and found that she had calmly gone back to dying her hair like nothing was going on. She has always been a bit of a handful. I've faced a lot of my fears for that child, I handled a heart problem and gestational diabetes,during the pregnancy as well as an emergency c-section and an infection that nearly took us both out, sickness and stress worrying if she was going to live and then coming home to a hell that had only gotten worse, but kids...what can you do? She made up for it by potty training faster than anybody else, crying less and being a sweet and fun baby for me to raise so far, though she is willful and the leader of most of the chaos that goes on in the house.
My middle son, he was my easiest pregnancy and such a sweet baby that just couldn't eat anything. We had to replace carpets, furniture, clothes, and have cars steamed cleaned repeatedly because of him. His nick name was,'Spew boy" because he could projectile vomit over 4 feet and he could scream for hours on end. I spent more time at the doctors office, hospital, and just trying to find out what was wrong with him than I did with any of my other kids, but nothing seemed to work or help and luckily, eventually, it passed and he became able to keep food down.
I laugh when I see or read articles by people who call themselves parenting experts when they have one kid who is maybe a toddler. I don't call myself an expert and I have 4 kids ranging in age from 16 to 8 and one of them has Downs Syndrome, one is a Genius and I have worked to raise them on a single moms income with no child support, an ex who tends to throw a monkey wrench into the works more than he helps and no vehicle. I might be an expert on feeding and clothing them on a shoestring budget and helping them to not get into trouble, be decent human beings and succeed in life, but I don't consider myself an expert at much else. I can tell you the best way to get poop out of a heater vent at 3 am on a Winters morning, or vomit off the wall behind the commode, or when its best to just throw the car seat in the dumpster along with the child's clothes and diaper, but that you NEVER, EVER, EVER, THROW AWAY THE STUFFIE! they remember that shit and it will haunt you I have recovered Jackson so damn often that I am forever seen as a hero in my little girls eyes for that if nothing else. I'm an expert in that I will tell you to always carry extra wipes,even when they are toddlers,and that carry a towel inn your car at all times, get that hand held sprayer for the shower because you will need it other than to make up for your lack of sex life. Ziplock baggies should be carried at all times. Anybody that smokes around a kid is a dick who deserves to be punched in the throat. Music is your friend, use it, kids love it. Learn to be silly, kids are your excuse for it, use it. Being poor is okay, but you don't have to be a poor parent, kids only care that you try hard.

Dear Roger: Memories Of Music

I have been listening to a band that is fairly new to me quite a bit lately and I was trying to figure out why the music made me so damn happy and then the song that I linked to this blog came up in the play list and it hit me, taking me back to late March 1990 and the Persian holiday of Nowruz.
In my early 20's I lived in the Dallas Metroplex and went to the University of Texas, while there and I met and fell head over heels in love with an Iranian research scientist who was not only a Mensa member, he was a gifted musician in both voice and violin and a very popular member of the huge Iranian expat community of both Dallas and Houston. He could hear a song once and play it back perfectly, and he had a vocal range that should have had him singing professionally. We were an odd couple to say the least, but we had a wonderful time attending parties, traveling around Dallas to visit his friends and going to movies where I would describe to him what was going on, because, he was blind, and had been since he was 26. He could tell the difference between light and dark, but that was it, other than that he was blind, but he was fully capable of getting around in all kinds of ways.
The community he belonged to was the predominantly Christian and Zoroastrian and Domi Iranian community. They were viewed with suspicion by the Muslims in the area and my ex-husband tended to want to end him. I kept my relationship with him a secret for quite a while for his safety, but when late March rolled around, I was at his apartment when he got a phone call and it turned out he was being summoned to Houston to perform at a party. This happened to coincide with Spring Break so we decided to make an adventure of it. The people summoning him paid all his expenses and that meant a rental car and hotels for the drive down as well as food for us, so it was a free vacation and little did I know at the time, a life changing event for both of us.
We toured Fredricksburg, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston where we arrived at the gates of a house/mansion? that was amazing. The people who welcomed us in were some of the most kind and gracious people I had ever met and they ended up throwing the most fantastic party I have ever attended. The music, the dancing, the fire jumping, the swords and the alcohol of all kinds along with God knows what else,was amazing. I remember the crowd yelling,"Chief! Chief!" every time he would start singing songs that either made the laugh or cry and he could make that violin alternately break your heart or make it race. I wasn't left out to stand in the corner by myself, the odd person out, I was drug into the middle of it and made to feel part of a large family because everyone there was a refugee and though most of them were richer than God, they knew the feeling of being strangers in a strange place.
That music takes me back to that time. I was in my young 20's a vastly different person than I am now, as many people in their early 20's tend to be. That Nowruz changed me in many ways, and me and my Persian musician went different directions. I think of him often, especially when I see my oldest daughter and I see his smile and dimples.
I think of him often, and that week we spent and Im grateful for musics ability to take me back to that time, it was one of the very happiest times in my life.

Dear Roger;My Wanderlust Left Without Me

I actually left the property yesterday and went and had coffee with a friend. Other than brief shopping excursions for necessities such as groceries, its the first time I have left the property in a couple of months. What the hell has happened to me? I used to GO all the damn time. I would never just stay around the house and be a sedentary person. I always have been a bit of a misanthrope, but I would go wandering on my own and go and see and do, but I hardly ever do that anymore. I think its the kids, having kids ropes you down. Having kids with no transportation, and no money damn sure slows the world down for you. It is an ordeal to go anywhere with my crew and since I am still trying to catch up all the financial messes that the ex left for me, it is just not easy to even fathom going anywhere.I want to go to my high school reunion so badly it hurts, but I just don't see how that is going to happen, especially with gas now hitting 5 bucks a gallon. I was planning on driving and making a mad dash through Arizona to collect a few things from storage that I needed to get, but the cost would just be out of my reach, especially with Stevie's birthday coming up and me wanting to really give her a nice one this time around.
She wants to get Baptized for her birthday. Gotta say, that kinda threw me for a loop. Shes a religious lil kid and I guess that's a good thing, maybe that will counterbalance the willfulness and the temper as she gets older. She is a very strong willed child, I think that goes along with the being super intelligent and the baby of the family. She is rocketing through much of the 3rd grade material in her new school, inn fact its more work for me to keep up with navigating her through all the parental logins and testing controls than it is for her to do the stuff. We have had quite a few discussions on various topics like Manifest Destiny, the Oregon Trail, Geometry and Symmetry, Minerals, and Bullying on the internet. The Internet part has been really interesting for her, she loves having a twitter and a Facebook and so far she has been really good with them. I have tired to make sure she isn't annoying people on there, but there are a couple of people she loves more than a little and she enjoys seeing them pop up in her feed and every now and then she will tweet out at them hoping to hear back, (like the thousands of other little fangirls),and the other night, SHE DID! I about fell off the couch when Jerad Anderson responded to her. Her shriek of happiness about caused her brother to have a heart attack as well and it was very cute to see her beaming face. It was a kind thing for him to do and yet another reason I support that band. She hasn't heard from her favorite boy yet, but she doesn't mind, she knows hes a busy man with a lot on his plate and she just gets excited and happy to see him show up online, and that was what prompted the lecture about bullying. She has seen some of the hateful comments directed towards that boy and his woman, and it distressed her. I told her that, that kind of behavior goes on all over the place because the internet gives cowards a voice that they wouldn't have otherwise. I explained to her about how there are small people with small lives who get jealous of others and the only way they can feel better about themselves is to try and tear down someone who is happy.She has been bullied at school, (until she fought back and started smacking up on people), so she knows that if you stand out or are different, or get attention that other people don't, it makes you a target, so she grasped that really quickly.
She loves having the ability to communicate with so many people and when people talk back to her, it makes her day.
We have been keeping busy around the house tormenting her older brother with a band that is new to us, "GolGol Bordello", the little kids and I absolutely love them, but for some reason, my eldest son cant stand them and it offends him that my daughter wanders through the house singing ,'Start Wearing Purple". Hes been on my case for months to listen to different music, and but the thing is, what he wants me to listen to and what I like are sooo far apart as to not be even in the same galaxy. I loathe Little Wayne, to the point I have unplugged speakers and threatened to throw them out the door into the rain, yet I come home yesterday and I find that for some reason my Youtube is suggesting I would like some of his other videos because I had listened to some of his crap previously? I think its time to change my computers password to something like my daughter has, its long as hell and when he asked for it so he could work on her computer he groaned and said,"Oh no way in hell! Im NOT typing that!" yeah...maybe shes got the right idea. Either way, if I leave the property again anytime soon, it will be with some good tunes in my pocket and hopefully the will to wander just a little further up the road, I think I need to .

Dear Roger: Indulge The Monkey Habit

I indulge my kids as best I can, everybody who knows me, knows that. I am more permissive than my some of my friends think is acceptable, and they are fairly convinced that my allowing my children to read, listen to or see some of the things they love and hold dear; is the sure fire path to hell. I don't agree and I think its actually really served them well.I was allowed fairly free rein as a child to read what I wanted, and I remember getting my first Stephen King book around the age of 12 and realizing that there were people out there who enjoyed getting the snot scared out of them just as much as I did, and it made me feel less like an outcast. You taking me to art galleries and strange movies and talking to me about music like Pink Floyd and the Talking Heads as well as introducing me to all kinds of ideas that there was a would full of people with different beliefs beyond what I found in that small town, was my salvation. You sparked my curiosity and made me question everything and hunger for more. I remember carrying home stacks of books that I read all summer long on your suggestion, just so I would be grounded in the classics and aware of what people were talking about when they made some vague reference to something or someone in a song or a movie and you got me to try different types of food and meet all kinds of people, helping me to realize that differences went beyond black and white and brown, that there were cultures so rich and vibrant and colorful that I would one day spend half a decade living amongst them and have a child who was a beautiful blend of both worlds.
I do my best to show my kids the same world you showed me. I give them books and access to things that sometimes may be a bit on the mature side, and they are aware of the reality of our lives. I dont hide from them the fact that money is tight and often lacking, when we are low on food or they want something I cant get for them, I tell them the truth so they are aware that life isnt always easy and while we might have it tough sometimes, we actually have it better than 2/3's of the world. We talk, we argue, we debate, and we discuss concepts that many families avoid talking about because they are uncomfortable, but we cant. Being the parent of a child with special needs who is entering puberty, I have already had to deal with some difficult situations and having,"The Talk" about appropriate public behavior with 4 kids ranging in age from nearly 8 to 16, was not fun and my eldest son was ready to put an end to the almost 12 year old, but it got the point across. My eldest son is very rigid in is moral code and at times its almost annoying. He is very anti-smoking, anti-drinking, anti-drug(thank God), and he is against premarital sex. Some how I have a son who is pretty much a textbook straightedger and he makes no bones about it. He says its just being a good Christian and living what he believes, but he gets on my case about cussing or listening to anything that has cussing in it, he gets on his siblings cases for sitting around in their underwear,(especially his sister), and he tells her to act more,"Ladylike". We had an argument the other day about me letting her watch some videos he felt were inappropriate, but she countered that he couldn't really find anything other than implied masturbation and violence that could possibly be inappropriate for her. She is a fierce debater when it comes to defending her Monkey fella, and that was the crux of the whole argument, her brother was on her case about that again and I think he was just bored and looking to fire her up. It got pretty heated and I just refereed, and eventually, she won, but he really has become quite a prude and she told me the other day,"Mom, you know how you said if anything happened to you that he would have to take over raising me?" I told her that was correct. She said,"Well, could you please find anyone else or tell them I could raise myself? Please?! Hes such a jerk he has already said he would pull of Jacksons head and I wouldn't be able to go to anymore concerts!" Brothers...I swear, the boy is enough to make me forget I speak English some days. Hes got a good heart and I know he loves her to death and that he was just saying that to get her goat, but I want to thump him in the ear.
Hes actually pretty proud of her right now, we just got word yesterday that after evaluating her coursework, looking at her test scores and what she is reading and other factors, the new school is placing Stevie in the 3rd grade with Gifted programming and 4th grade language arts. She is thrilled about that and even more excited to be getting her online access to a yoga class. She intends to force me and her brother to participate.Speaking of online, I caved and set her up a Facebook and a twitter account and I have begun teaching her netiquette. She is a quick learner and was over the moon to be able to compose her first tweet, which of course was not to me, but to her most favorite person in the universe. As always, I am playing second fiddle to a monkey.

Dear Roger: Monkey On The 'Net

So now my daughter is doing the home/internet based school and this has led to some interesting moments. She is extremely tech savvy and she has an almost photographic memory, and in many ways, that is a bad, bad thing. She saw my log in to my computer once, I left for work and came back, she was on my computer and surfing the net. I asked her brother if he had logged her on and he said that he hadn't, she tells me, "Oh, not I did it, I just put in your log in and password."She had been back to several websites she ha been to with me several weeks previous and she had managed to almost figure out twitter. That will be a heart attack moment.
She is an extremely social child, but most kids her age bore the hell out of her. I have had to remind her time and time again that its not polite to roll her eyes or to tell another child that something they enjoy is for babies. She doesn't play with Barbies or normal toys like most kids and she rarely watched cartoons, so she really doesn't have a common ground to talk to many of the kids she was going to with on. She has lived a little harsher life with more difficult things going on in it , so she is emotionally and mentally more mature than many kids her age and she prefers to talk to older kids and adults. Shes also been picked on for being,"Weird" because she is dramatic and she is brash and she not afraid to get up on a stage and sing or perform and that tends to annoy kids.
On the Pajama reading day she took Jackson to school with her so she would have someone to read to. It was condoned by the school and many kids were bringing a friend along. She has brought Jackson a few times in the past and he is her go to for all trips and comfort needed excursions,and its pretty evident to anyone who sees her with him that he is well loved. Some punk ass kid, she wouldn't say who, slapped him out of her hands and into a mud puddle.He got covered in filth and the teacher, bless her heart for trying to be compassionate, helped my daughter recover the mucky, sopping wet with mud, monkey and then, she washed him. Stevie was bereft when she got home. Not only was he still wet, she mourned the fact he had been,"De-sweatted" . Mind you, I had to keep a straight face while dealing with all of this, telling her that the spirit of the event still lurked, while I was busy using a hair dryer to carefully, under her watchful eye so he didn't get his monkey butt burned, dry off the monkey with a hair dryer. She is better off doing the internet based school. No one here,(except maybe her brother), will torture her monkey, or tease her and she is rapidly learning how to reach out to the outside world to build new friendships that have her excited and curious about all kinds of things.
She has her own Facebook page now, we made it yesterday, borrowing her older brothers birthyear, which amused her, and then spending a couple of hours together just setting up the different things.She got so she could log on and enter her password and get to the page almost as fast as me. She is so damn clever that I will have to really keep an eye on the computer to make sure shes not plotting total world domination via Facebook when shes not doing schoolwork.
The first thing she did was go to that boys page and,"Like" it. I had to explain to her about how some pages are pages you can talk to people on and others a just pages where you can tell them you like them. She scoffed and said,"Well he already knows I like him! I want to tell him to come to Portland!"
Did I tell you Rog, I pretty much went fully gray yesterday?

Dear Roger: No Meltdowns Allowed In Front Of The Teenager

Okay, I will admit it, I get lonely, damn lonely. The kind of lonely where you wish just anyone would call, come by, tweet, text or somehow aknowledge they know you exist. Yes, I know I have kids who do that for me on a daily basis, and that is great, I love my kids, we all know that they are what I live for, but as much as I tend to eschew them, a Goddamned hug from a another human being sure would be nice from time to time. The touch of a man would be even better. Yeah, its Valentines Day and between that and all the typical B/S and stress in my life, that has me all out of whack and Im having a huge ole pity party of epic proportions.
Chance made the mistake of asking me what was wrong yesterday when I came in from work,and sat down at the table looking, I guess to him, more disconsolate that usual. I had just observed one of our more unpleasant residents, a rather large woman of dubious personal hygiene and less than pleasant personality,telling her new boyfriend goodbye. I dont get it.She doent work, she smokes and drinks and looks like she crawled out of a rag bag in her pajamas and flip flops on a daily basis, yet she has a man? Am I doing it wrong? Should I quit showering regularly? Stop shaving my legs and other areas and just wear my house clothes constantly? Im one of the few parents dressed in street clothes at the bus stop in the morning, maybe that should change. I should start sleeping in til the last minute and then stand there with a cigarrett and yell into my cell phone, ignoring my kids while we wait, maybe that is what passes for attractive up here? Anyway, I had witnessed that and It was just another shot to me, another bit of reality that I am alone when it seems all those around me have some one.
My relationships have never been perfect. I've had a few decent ones, a few fun ones and a few nightmares, and sadly, the nightmares have left the most lasting marks, physically, but the decent one that left the deepest mark on my emotionally, is probably the crux of the problem. When you love someone who holds your heart with the hint of ,"In Time", its hard to walk away. I hated being in love. Its a very lonely feeling and I have worked hard to not be, but just seeing that person or hearing his voice or even getting a,'Hey, how are you?" email, can overwhelm all my defenses and leave me helplessly devastated for days. No one will ever be him, and when I hold all men to that standard, they fail. I thought that maybe being alone was my best option, but when you find yourself starved for some form of physical affection, or human contact, that you feel like you are going to go insane or that you are starving to death emotionally from the lack of the one nutrient that no one wants to provide someone so damaged and hard to love, its a horrible feeling. I try to soldier on through, but I find myself having a harder and harder time lately. I never thought I would be so alone at this point in my life, and while much of it is of my own design, I just wish for once there was a reason to believe in happy endings or white knights.

Dear Roger: You Dont Know What You've Got Til Its Gone

So the entertainment world lost yet another one to the grinding self-abuse machine that is the cult of celebrity yesterday. I am not going to sugar-coat my opinion of what happened to her because she had been very open about her struggles with substance abuse. Its horrible and sad because she has a child, but what is worse is the entire double standard that allows people who have money and fame to escape entanglements that would call them to task for their fuckery and perhaps save their lives. I dont mean to say that the legal system is a great source of rehabilitation for someone with substance abuse issues, but its better than nothing, better than it being brushed under the rug or some high priced rep covering for them until the worst happens.
The regular news carries the celebrity nonsense now, so I see and hear about who gets yet another slap on the wrist for getting caught with yet more cocaine or crank, or busted for drunken driving and then spending maybe 80 minutes in some holding cell at lock up with their expensive bottled water and snacks while the pap rats bay for them outside.They walk out to their waiting 60k Suv's while poor kids are fed into the meat grinder of the legal system for the same charge and left to languish for weeks because they dont have the name or the hook of fame. I wonder how many of those kids watched those celebs get off time and time again and thought they would get the same deal? I remember being a campus cop in Northern AZ and being told not to stop certain cars or people because they were friends of the college president or visiting celebrities, and if they were drunk or behaving badly, we were supposed to just escort them home and maintain radio silence. You get the justice you can afford and sometimes that is a bad thing in both directions.
Artsy personalities are difficult folk, you and I both know that one in spades. Watching friends destroy their lives with drugs when I was younger is perhaps all that saved me from it. When I was in Dallas I ran with some rich and powerful people and I did some really fucked up things. It was a different life and a different time. I had access to things that I had never had access to before and let me tell you, I indulged and it was often pretty damn fun and entertaining.I do know that its possible to go over 120mph on Beltline at 3 in the morning with a car full of people. I know all kinds of places in North Richland Hills to hide from cops or where if you are in the right kind of vehicle, they just look the other way. I lived to grow up with minimal scars, some of my friends didn't.
I guess I really saw the cost of drugs in the mid-90's when I watched a boy I was friends with, a very talented guitarist, get hooked on heroin. Will lived in the small Arizona town I worked in as an Emt and he hated every minute of living there. He was biding his time until he had enough money saved to get out and then he was headed to L.A., but the problem was, he developed a habit. I dont know when it started, but the change that came over him was dramatic. He never had been a big guy and he was always pale, but when he saddled that horse, he got even more so. He stopped eating which was horrible for a diabetic and I ended up having to run on him as an EMT, that is how I found out about his habit. Drugs dont take long to eat someone who already has health problems and it only took about 6 months before we lost Will. A combination of too much heroin and too little insulin left him in a coma that he never came out of and he never left Arizona.
I've lost more than a few people to stupidity, killed either by their own hand or through the drunken/drugged insanity of others and it has left scars that will never heal. I've watched others struggle with it, and I know the signs well enough that I often watch for names on the news with trepidation. I was a huge Stevie Ray Vaughn fan, my baby girls name is evidence enough of that, she is named for him and my ex's best friend who was a Hells Angel so she we often say she was named for a Hells Angel and a helluva Texas Bluesman). I am not someone who names my kids after someone lightly, but he meant so much to me growing up. I can hear the first notes of anything he played and it takes me to memories that keep me going. I know he struggled mightily, and I was so proud to see him win and persevere and finally pull his life together. I was looking forward to seeing him in concert and then one day, I was sitting on my couch watching the news and he was just...gone.I admit it, I cried hard. I still cant listen to songs like,"Life By The Drop " without choking up some.
We lost so many so young, Freddie Mercury was another tragedy that broke my heart in many ways and still does as does Michael Hutchence and Kurt Cobain. Not all substance abuse, but struggles with a life that gets beyond control and overindulged. Sometimes too much of a good thing is too much and folks need a big ole adult time out to remind them that they belong in the real world and have real rules to live by, it just might save their lives. Kindness and compassion and understanding are important, not constantly demanding to know every little thing and maybe, just maybe , being grateful that when you see their name in the news its for life and not death.