Dear Roger: Love, Little Boxes, Breaking Molds, AIDS, and Finding Somebody to Love

The season of "Giving" is approaching and im finally getting back into my charity work. Its something I had really missed, and thanks to some friends of mine, I got out and did the Portland AidsWalk. The walk not only met its goal, it exceeded it by over 45k! It was quite an experience to be involved in it and I enjoyed myself. The scene was as Portlandia as Portland gets and I don't think I have felt so welcomed since I have been here. The boys who were part of my team are friends of mine and we made a day of it, just walking along talking about our experiences growing up and dealing with a society the expects everyone to fall into a particular mold. There were people of every size, shape and description walking in that fundraiser, they were walking for friends, family, loved ones, themselves or just because they know that Aids is a terrible disease we should have defeated over a decade ago. I walked in memory of my cousin and for all the people who live in the shadows and in fear. That was a huge topic of discussion that day, the stigma.
I remember seeing on the news the misery and torture that Ryan White went through when he was diagnosed with Aids and how horrible people treated a child who had an illness he had no control over and that was going to kill him. It was just the tip of the iceberg of how gay people were and are treated.
I've never gotten it. I know I was raised with a certain attitude in my home as a child because when my said to her friend that she suspected I was more than just a,"Tomboy", it freaked me the hell out. I was already getting harassed by some of the prominent members of the football team at school and called things like,"Dyke"  because of how I dressed and acted and my sports playing as well as being ostracized by people who had been friends and neighbors previously, so when my own mother made comments about my room decor  (Hollywood stars of the 40's of both sexes), It horrified me and probably had a lot to do with why I became a bit of a sexually aggressive young adult that had kids early.
I've grown a lot since then and reached a point in my life where I don't care what other people think about me, and I am just accepting of where I am in life. I am at peace with my place in life and accepting of difference and I wish more people were the same way. I see people that I know are living in pain, living in the shadows and hiding who they are and who they love for the sake of their careers or family or community and I see the heartache and the pain it causes and it hurts my heart for them because I know how much it hurts. It was refreshing to admit to myself and the friends I walked with that day that love is love is love and being open to accepting it no matter if its not in the form you or anyone else expected is an amazing and freeing way to be.
It was hard for me as a parent of 5 kids to reach that point. I was fast on the way to falling into lockstep with my family and I wanted my children to be,"NORMAL", with my sons being tough and strong men who would go on to the Corp of Cadets at Texas A&M and marry good girls with all the traditional trappings of Texas to follow. I wanted my daughters to be good girls who would marry respectable men who would be their equals and respectable members of the community. I wanted my daughters to go on to either Texas A&M or UT and get their Doctorates and become powerful women who would lead their communities before they gave me a few grand kids to spoil rotten. The thing is with my kids it that they are individuals, and as individuals they have very distinct paths and hopes for the future. My eldest has already made her own distinct path and TAMU is not on the radar and she has not shown any interest in dating.  My eldest son wants to go to college in Oregon and he talks of never marrying quite frequently. My other two boys are a puzzle. My youngest daughter has had her sights set on one particular fella for a long time and she tends to talk of TAMU as being the only school that is worth even considering, but I have stopped pushing that, and when we talk of the future and what my dreams of for my kids, I simply say, "I want to look in your faces and only see joy and peace, never pain or unhappiness, if I see that, then I know I did my job as a parent. Ill love you no matter who you love, what you become, where you are or what you are doing. If YOU are happy and being a good person who does no harm to others, then I am at peace with that."
I've always been a person who when told to zig, I zagged. I resented being forced into molds and little boxes. I always worked non-traditional jobs, dated or even married the type of guy who was so far removed from the family norm that I am sure my parents wished I had been gay at times. It wasn't because I was trying to to purposely offend anyone, it was just at the time, the person who walked into my life and shook up my world with love happened to be a Lebanese Semi-pro soccer player, or an Iranian gypsy violin playing/singing, blind, research scientist,(still do carry a bit of a torch for him), or a former Hell's Angel Prospect with issues of his own who ive now reached a peace with and share most of my kids with. Love doesn't always fit a perfect mold and being accepting of the form it takes is part of being a grown human and I think I have finally grown up.

Dear Roger: The Monkey Found Its Balls

I am a generally good natured person. I like to believe that people are who they try to portray themselves to be, but I am also a bit of a protectionist person who suspects everyone's motivations and I try to just handle my business on my own and not owe anyone a damn thing because when you let someone do you a favor, they think they own a piece of you and no one owns me. I have worked very damn hard to get to where I am, I am raising my kids on my own, housing and feeding, and clothing them, with no social life or any of that because I dont have time for it. I work and I am always looking for a way to better our circumstances but NOT at the detriment of others. I fiercely defend my loved ones, but I prefer to just move on and leave the problems behind me. Other people, I have found, do not operate by the same code, but I have managed to navigate around them so far even if they have had me angry enough to spend a few hours reviewing Libel law and what constitutes a good slander case after. I let my Buddhist learning take over and I just decided that karma will out.
I have gotten tougher and much, much braver lately about actually dealing with people and NOT returning to my den and flipping the monkey upside down. Currently the monkey is right side up, erect and flipping the bird in aggravation, but that is the pose my son put him in, and while I understand his sentiment, I try not to take it down the stairs with me. I have been focusing on the positive things in my life. I wildly upgraded my phone from the basic Iphone 4 to an Iphone 4s 16g which now means I have a better camera and more storage and even better, SIRI and all kinds of fun tools to play with. I did the same for my son and mayhem has ensued. He wanted the 5 but I didn't want to wait that long for a phone, and I couldn't justify that kind of expense. This was the result of a bad business decision on my part that I had to extricate myself out of due to my job, and while it was a very costly lesson to me, it actually taught my son a lot more and he is now a much more wary and untrusting person, especially of women. He sort of jokingly claimed he was going to become gay just so he no longer had to deal with women and their manipulations.
I actually wrote and mailed a letter that I had been dared to write a long time ago. I still cant believe I did it, and after I put it in the mailbox, I stood there in panic wanting to get it back but unable to fit my hand through the mail slot. I had no I.D. with me and the mail lady wouldn't give it back to me, so its off and gone. My first ever letter of that nature. F.M.L.
My writing is coming in fits and starts, and once its more reliable and smoothed out again, Ill post something on my tumblr about it, but for now I want to keep working on making sure the characters are true to themselves and that the story flows well. I've been working on Secrets, but Long Distance is almost done with the editing, and the re-vamp of Drifts should be done any day now. Its just a matter of finding the time to sit down at my computer to put them all together and then out there for the world to peruse.
Im not walking with my head down as much and that is a good thing. I can walk with my head up, knowing that I am doing this on my own, earning my keep working an honest job using my brain and my honest effort with no man paying anything for me, though the ex did finally find a job back in Arizona, he still struggles to just keep himself fed. My kids are happy and busy and we are soon to have a car so we wont be spending this winter walking in the rain or trapped in the house. '
Progress has been made and balls have been found.

Dear Roger: Trusting Your Gut and What Its Worth

I got news last night that shook me. As my snarky teen son sat next to me on the couch and tried to convince me I was tired and needed to go to bed, while I was busy reading a blog by a young woman that I have come to care about as a distant friend, another friend who is from my past in law enforcement sent me a chat message on Facebook. He just asked if I had heard about an officer that we used to work with. It took a minute or two for the memory to come to surface, but once it did, the mans face was clear as a bell, he had been my eldest sons fathers best friend.
Whenever my sons father was on duty at the ambulance, this officer was around. They went shooting together, went to training's together for weeks, and they were as close as brothers. My sons father would even drive the nearly 300 miles from his home in Tucson on his days off, just to hang out with this officer and go places with him. I thought it odd at the time, but the relationship I had with my sons father was so turbulent and scary, that I dared not say a word about it. When I finally managed to get away from my sons father and he quit the department and was told not to return, the officer was not happy with me, but he left me alone. I remember him being a bit arrogant and odd, but not an overtly horrible person. We ate meals together, worked scenes together, saved lives together. He wore a badge and was part of my family in that way. If I hadn't been able to hide from my sons father due to his violence and threats of violence, and if he had gotten parental rights, the officer most likely would have been my sons Godfather and most assuredly would have been in my sons life quite a bit and I would have had no say in it, but I did what I knew I had to do as a mother and i protected my son and I fought to keep a monster out of my sons life for over 16 years.
I found out last night that trusting my gut and going without many of the things that so many women take for granted such as a man to help support and guide a son, child support or any kind of financial assistance, the security of knowing that no one is going to hurt your child because they love them,(in fact, he promised he would kill him if given the chance), knowing the medical and family history of the paternal side of my sons family, and my career, which I gave up and changed to stay below the radar for many years, was the right decision.
The officer who was my sons fathers best friend was accused by his eldest daughter of continually molesting her when she was a young girl. The investigation is just beginning, but he will never be arrested or serve any time for it because he took his own life shortly after being questioned about it.
Do I think my sons father would have been capable of being involved in such things? I will never know, but I am damn sure glad I will never have to find out.
Its a smaller world than we realize and we are all connected along our journey. I firmly believe that, even though we have vastly different lives and struggles and paths that we follow, we share things with each other and reading the young woman's blog posting last night reminded me of that because just the other day I was cleaning out my old certifications and getting rid of things that I no longer hold as essential to where I am in life now, and one of the first things I came across was my certification as a,"Tobacco Cessation Counselor" that I received when I was an Americorp Member. As part of my tour of duty and as a former smoker, I got certified and I taught classes on how to quit smoking,(a sort of AA styled thing), and one of the ways to quit that they had been pushing was a drug...a drug that I had recently heard about via a tragedy. I had done more research after hearing about this event, and how unpredictable it was and due to the population I was working with, (largely Native, Impoverished and poly-substance abusers), I refused to even introduce it as a possibility. I encouraged natural methods, along with diet, exercise, the patch and distraction. I had a 95% success rate. It was the first time I had ever heard that name, that name that would a short time later circle around and mean much more to us and my daughter than I could ever explain, but it is an odd synchronicity that has reverberated  through many lives now and I will not discount it.
Trust yourself, you are stronger than you know, and there are forces in the world that make us all accountable to and for each other.
Blessings and strength to you all.

Dear Roger: The Monkey Is Running Amuck

School is back is session! I say that with the joy of a parent who is now free to walk around their house with THEIR music playing at an obnoxiously loud level while they scratch inappropriate places on their naked body eating goodies that they had stashed away, waiting for a moment when the ravening hordes of children weren't around to give them the sad puppy dog eyes and say,"Can I have a bite?" HAH! No! I'm going to go to McRaes today and have a plate of french fries with gravy and lots of katsup and I'm going to mix the two, like I like them. Its been over a year since I've had time to myself, and I'm a bit on the twitchy side if you cannot tell. I love my kids, in fact I live for my kids, but after not having a break from them I'm about ready to run off screaming down Burnside.
I think the kids were ready to go back as well, I know my daughter was even though the principal seemingly ignored our previous discussion about just letting her be a typical 3rd grader and he has stuck her in an advanced class as an 4th grader, at least she wont get bored and she really seems to like her teacher who is a young, blonde, cheerleader type. My daughter...Buffy in training.
She only took Jackson to the first day of school. I was pretty proud of her for that. Of course the minute she was in the door of home she was right into her room to grab him and hug him to tell him all about her day, but she let him stay home because she didn't want him stuck in her desk,"Alone and bored all day." Maybe she will let him skip picture day this year though in a way that would make me kinda sad.
The boys were not pleased to be back in school. Stubby just is not pleased about school no matter what. He would rather just stay home and read because hes anti-social and not a happy camper, but he knows its not an option.
Sticky was sort of happy to be back, he likes seeing his friends and hes very popular at his school, so its like going to a bit of a party for him everyday except for the part where they make him actually do some schoolwork.
My eldest was piled on with Physics, Economics, Algebra 2, Psychology, and Lit homework his first day. He was up late getting it all done and whining about the misery of being in Advanced Placement classes, while he is working but I had little to no sympathy for him. I do have to wonder about the intelligence of a school district that has the high school kids starting at 0730 and the elementary kids starting at 0830, if you ask me, I think it should be the other way around.
Im hoping to get back to writing more now that the kids are going back to school, my muse took a runner on me a couple of months ago and said,"Screw this mess!" and between work, kids, moving and all the other mess I haven't even promoted the books I have out other than to occasionally sell the paper copies I have on hand. I have a few story ideas cooking, and I need to get them put down, and I need to track down where in the hell the copyright office sent my copyright papers on one of my novels, so I need to get serious about my own life again.
I love Fall for many, many reasons, its a good time of year. I've got friends planning on coming over to watch a concert with us on our new big screen tv on the 18th, so I am actively socializing and making new friends and introducing them to the music and things I love while checking out the things they love and I'm going places and meeting new people and making plans for a future I never expected to have and I think that is a good thing.