Dear Roger: And Now Its Time To Say GoodBye

The boys who used to be friends, who helped me find myself to this point in my path, used to end their concerts with something they called the,"Thank You Song" and in it, Jackson would thank each member of the band and showcase them for a moment, and then thank the audience and all those who contributed to the odd little wonderful moment in time that was the 100 Monkeys. It was fun and often was followed by a little break and then an encore, this is my,"Thank You" and my encore is elsewhere, a path that few will follow with me because its even more complicated and twisty than anything the 100 Moneys and those odd young men and even their complicated lives could have imagined.

I wont be writing you here after tonight. Ive been contemplating how to say my farewell, and while I am not a fan of goodbyes,(I much prefer the less final,"See you later"), this is a goodbye to this name, this page and this way of being and this life.  I have grown, changed and found myself and I have no regrets other than maybe missing SBL this year for a damn job, and never getting a real, bonafied Ben Grauper hug, or maybe never being able to see more than one damn tour stop of those kids, but that is the breaks, life rolls on and kids grow up and forget you and sadly you find yourself finding that other things hold precedence over your love of a ragtag band of pretty little boys that made good music and that is where I have found myself.

I published 3 books, wrote a helluva lot more, and guess what? I need to get off my ass and publish them and I will be, here in the near future. Where I came to Portland a shadow, not talking, angry and wanting to die with no hope or dreams, I am leaving this page a new person who walks straight and I am SHINY,(You other Browncoats get that shit, doncha?), I have been through a LOT. Had my fucking heart ripped out, shit on and crushed and then lit on fire and I stomped it out, dusted it off, crammed it back into place and said,"Well? His loss, fuck HIM!" and I got my revenge by keeping moving forward and knowing I dont need anyone to hold my hand to get shit done. I cranked back up my favorite Graupner tunes that he always hated and I went right back to pushing forward on my own and that is how I reached this point in my path where its time to say farewell to this place that was my home and venting board. 

To those of you who have supported me, commented and followed me, I thank you and I wish you well and I hope you find peace on your journeys. As for the young men that were the inspiration for me to start mine? I wish each and every one of them and their loved ones  peace, love, joy and and especially for the missing one that was the constant voice in my ears as I fought the hardest of my battles, please know that you are never far from many peoples thoughts and hopes for your happiness and peace and that you are missed more than a little.

Dear Roger: Memories of Burning Mountains

In the early 1990's I was at loose ends and unsure what I wanted to be when I,"Grew Up". Burnt out on college, dealing with trying to pull my life back together and out of the Dallas party culture before I found myself at the bottom of Lake Ray Hubbard, I got in my truck and headed west to Arizona and the one place that had always been a safe haven for me, my grandmothers house. She allowed me a couple of weeks to mope and hang out with my uncle and then it was,'Get off your butt, get a job, or get in school, but you keep moving forward."

I met a man who was a paramedic firefighter and he introduced me to a tiny rural fire department called Rio Rico Fire District and it was a turning point for my entire life. Class after class was offered to me, and I discovered that even more exciting than drinking and racing through the Metroplex at top speed, was responding to calls for service as a volunteer firefighter. 

My early training was that of a Wildland firefighter and that was where I found my groove. Hiking miles into the Nogales mountains to put out fires on the sides of mountains that were caused by either lightning or border crossers, (who would sometimes set them when they got lost and needed help),was dirty, exhausting, and dangerous. We carried just the tools on our backs;usually just shovels, axes, pulaskis, chainsaws and our fire shelters, euphemistically called our,"Shake and bakes". 

It was every firefighters worst fear, to hear a voice crackle across the radio saying,"No route out, deploy shelters NOW!" Often we discussed what we would do, run or deploy? I always knew I would just run. The shelters were terrifying tools that did not guarantee life, in fact, the salty old chief who trained me and my young crew in their use advised us that we might not even want to live if we had to deploy them. We were told that if they had to be used, then we were facing certain injury and burns. As I stood in position with my shelter, waiting to drop to the ground with it over me, he walked the line of us pointing out the members of my team who had shed their gloves,"You will lose all your fingers, maybe your hands too because you took off your gloves. You will cook the top of your head, put your damn helmet back on. You, put your damn pack back on, you want to lose all the skin on your back and ass? Pull up your bandannas over your faces, tuck your chins to your chests, try to bury your faces in the dirt as much as possible to protect them and breathe shallow breathes to keep the super-heated air to a minimum, but if you are in a thickly covered, brushy area, you are fucked! Find dirt and get in it." He had us drop and cover with the bulky, canvas-like shelters and then he walked among us, pulling and tugging on them to simulate the stress that the weather a fire would create would put on them. After a while it got quiet and we lay there, the rocks and ants as well as the sweltering Arizona heat making us miserable as we contemplated the horror of having to use such a device and I knew then, as a survivor of being burned as a child, I would never be able to do it, I would run and just a few short months later on the side of one of those mountains, I did,  I ran like hell itself was after me, and I escaped with only losing the hair on the back of my neck, parts off the backs of my ears, and 6 weeks of dispatch duty for disobeying a direct order. 

Storm King happened during my service as a firefighter, and standing memorial for those firefighters hurt, and it still does. I remember hearing about it and how it changed how we did things in public safety in the days before all the fancy technology and GPS. I had hopes with all the changes in tech and things available that maybe things had advanced in fire shelter technology so that there was a better chance for those who had to deploy them, that maybe there was some kind better reflective cloth or better cooling system, something, anything that would make the lives of the crews a little less risky, but it appears that there have been no advancements, that the same damn military spec lined canvas shelter that does nothing much more that offer containment for the recovery, and that is sad. We lost 14 on Storm King, now 19 in Arizona, and that's just THIS YEAR, and its the ones that are getting attention because they are in such huge amounts, but Wildland Firefighters/Hotshots, die almost every single season! They put their lives on the line to save property and lives because the Forest Service often doesn't or cant thin the forest the way they need to in order to prevent disasters, so we mourn for a few weeks, then move on to going back to castigating a little old Southern lady for admitting she said a bad word 20 years ago.

Shame on us. 

Dear Roger:Someone Who Gets Your Weird

Things are sort of back to normal,(at least our kind of normal), I lost my shit, had a good soul cleansing, heart ripped apart, cry and then he dragged me out for Zombie Marathon training and I poured all that angst and pain into one helluva run time. I mean, seriously, I kicked ass, but he figured out I was hurting and he didn't like the fact I was fueling my workout with pain, so he made me talk it out and we found our rhythm again. Yeah, it will never be what I wish I had, he still likes cock and I still don't have one, but he is still my best friend I love with all my pathetic excuse of a heart and he gets I'm pretty messed up and unsure of what to make of myself and my life.
I'm not a lesbian, because for sure I don't like chicks at all. Most of the time I don't even like being around women because they annoy me. I'm not girly and have no girly skills and I just end up weirded out and confused when too many of them are around me. I like guys, but I like guys who know their place and who are submissive and just kind of know when to shut up and do what they are told. I also like them quirky and a bit weird, so it makes it pretty much impossible to find what I am looking for because they tend to be with other quirky, weird guys. I prefer the company of my boy. He is funny and articulate and he listens to me and hes just a damn good, decent human being that I would fight the demons of hell for, because hes proven to me that hes just worth it,(even though he is currently laying here snoring like a sawmill going through petrified wood)hes not got a bad bone in his body.
My kids love him and call him their,"Stepdad", my ex refers to him as my,"Gay accountant husband" and my eldest son may occasionally bitch and complain about having to share my attention with him, but he is also very protective of him and considers him a member of the family.
I love this young, special man that has wandered into my life, and while its not a perfect or storybook love that so many of my friends seem to have, its a love that while fraught with trial and error, and often pain and learning, its a love that comes from the heart and grows as its cultivated by all of us in our home. As long as I have it, I will value it, treasure it and help him to become the man I know he will be, and watch him move into the world as he needs to, either with me or without, but assuredly with love all around.
We are training in earnest for the Seattle Zombie Run that takes place August 24th and while that has been fun, it has also been exhausting. We started off just power walking for endurance and once we got up to 5 miles a night, we figured it was time to move to the cross-country aspect of it. I got him an Iphone and we added the Zombies,Run app and there began the real insanity. You really have to pick your playlists carefully because I found that some of my favorite musicians are long winded s,o,b,'s and it been had to coordinate run times.We found a park that has really steep trails and off road terrain that is great for the obstacle course aspect of the marathon and we have been utilizing it as best we can, (without killing ourselves), on a daily basis.
I am seeing a huge difference in him and myself and I thinks its a great plan for the both of us,

Dear Roger: Foolish, Foolish Heart

A long time ago I vowed to never let myself fall in love again. I was tired of being hurt and I felt I was just too badly damaged from the past to be able to provide anything of value to anyone else, and it was also after the realization that while I had loved, I had never been loved in return with the same depth and devotion. I am one of those people that are easily forgotten when I am not around. I have always been a guardian and a caregiver, and someone who enjoys taking care of others, but I never seem to find the like. For close to four years I have lived a solitary life, even limiting the contact with friends to very casual internet based relationships or intermittent social engagements that mostly revolved around music. My life has been; work, support the kids, clean the house, write, and repeat up until about a year ago.
I am not a person who makes friends easily, I tend to be judgmental and wary,(especially of men), and for someone to catch my eye they have to be pretty damn special, and he is special. Its not that I found him to be drop-dead handsome, or even close to what would typically catch my interest, but the kindness in his eyes and his humor caught me, and then over the past year just getting to know him as we became closer and closer friends and he became more and more involved in my life, and I in his, he unintentionally found his way inside my cold stone heart and he cracked it.
Ill admit it, against all reason and logic and sanity, my stupid, stupid heart fell very badly in love with him. I have fought it very hard. I have spent time trying to help him move along his path in the world so he could one day achieve his dream, and I've been helping him remake himself and get into shape and improve his self-image so he would see the beautiful and wonderful man that he is, in the hopes that I would be happy for him when he found Mr. Right. Yeah...MR. Right, he's gay. See what I mean about my heart being stupid? In its defense he is the most hetero gay man we have ever met, but hes gay and we know that, but it didn't listen and every day we fell a little deeper, even when I helped him adjust his profile on a dating site so he could start meeting people after a breakup with his last horrible ex.
He lives with me, I drive him to work,and I look forward to him getting home in the afternoons so I can hear about his day before we take our evening walk. Prior to this weekend we had fallen into the rhythm of an old married couple, with the kids counting on him for help with homework and he had stepped up as a father figure to them. We consulted together on shopping and household expenses and we made decisions together, and made plans together to go camping and take vacations after the drama of this stressful month of work was over, but then the reality of just what and where I am came slamming home to me.
Some people from Texas I have known for a very long time came to town for a Gay social event called,"Bear Town", wanting to visit with them and increase his social circle, I introduced them thinking they would keep him safe and introduce him to some people. We had a good time the initial day they arrived and then we made plans to attend a Burlesque show Thursday,(which we did and had fun), but then Friday he got invited out to a more risque party along with some guy he met online and he went,(I drove him), and I got a text at midnight that he was not coming home.
Devastation? Shockingly, Yes.He had always seemed to have a stronger moral code than someone who would just engage in a random hookup, one night stand after a first date. Trying to process all the feelings that went through me will take weeks but first and foremost was anger. Not at him, never at him. I still love him as much as I ever did because he would not want this and he would be upset if he knew. Hes always been honest and direct about what he is and his predilections. I am angry at myself and I hate myself and my stupid, weak heart for allowing this to happen.
I don't know what to do at this point other than to just shut myself off completely. I wrap myself up in my work already as much as possible, and I had relished the times with him because he is the one thing that makes it all worth it, the one person who never complains or gripes at me or gives me a hard time, and who seems to actually appreciate what I do. I don't even get that from my kids. We do things together,(well, we did), now that he is out doing who and whatever, I wonder if that will stop? Or when the older and somewhat more loosely moralized gays leave, will he go back to the way he was?
I gave up on love because I quite believing in it because it never came my way, and because its just obviously not meant to be for me, and I am doomed to be the one forever supporting others on their way to finding it elsewhere.

Dear Roger: All For Naught?

I don't know the exact moment when I lost my life, but it seemed to happen slowly for me, especially since I had always been a somewhat selfish and daredevil type person. I lived a lifestyle of someone who really didn't expect to live a long life, but it was going to be a fun life packed with as much adventure and debauchery as possible, but then one day I got a wake up call in the form of a little curly haired, blue eyed, dimpled , baby boy that had no one to count on but me. His biological father had not been inclined to contribute anything other than some dna that he felt necessary to force upon me, and death threats for both of us when I contacted him with the news he was going to be a father, I guess when one is a paramedic, the only lives one cares about are those of strangers, but thus I digress. The baby boy only had me; erratic, immature, selfish, ME. I wasn't sure what to do with him at first but then he looked at me with those big blue eyes and something came over me and I knew that I had to do  my best for him no matter what, and my best was taking whatever jobs I could find, getting back into school so I could eventually get better paying jobs, and it meant that I stopped all the things that I used to do FOR myself.
For close to the last two decades I have lived for that little boy, (and his siblings), I made tough choice, gave up friends, dreams, pride, and travel to make sure he had things he wanted and needed. I'm not crying about it, its simply the way things are supposed to be. I struggled, I was humiliated from time to time, asking strangers for help when my health became so tenuous that I could not work enough to provide well for the little boy, I have sat in public assistance offices under the cold glare of the cheap lighting and felt like I wanted to sink through the floor, I have read the posts on my friends Facebooks walls about how they they welfare recipients are scum, and I cringe and think to myself that I wonder if they have any idea how humiliating and hard it is for someone who has had it all, then lost it all and struggled to take care of a child on their on while trying to get the father to help out, to real that kind of post from,"Friends" but I never say anything, I just pretend I didn't see it and I read on down and see their next post about how they think abortion is murder, and I remember about how that is what the father demanded that I end the little boy that way and how for one desperate moment when I realized I was going to be kicked out of Paramedic school and lose my job as an EMT, I considered it, but then I say nothing and I remember how much I loved that little boy from the moment he was placed in my arms.
He was a sweet child, all curls and dimples and big blue eyes and polite manners that charmed the hell out of everyone who met him. He has always been strikingly handsome and he was an outstanding student up until he reached high school, and even when life at home became difficult due to the situation with my exhusband, the little boy tried his best to be the hero. He started to change after he became a teenager, and while that is expected, he became a hostile and angry young man.
Ive tried soo many things to help him, he wanted to stay in one place, we stayed in one place until the reason he wanted to stay was not working out. He wanted to try online high school I let him try online high school. He wanted to go back to high school, I helped him go back. He wanted to move, we moved. We finally got a car, finally moved to a great neighborhood, finally have a great life looking right at us and he just seems to be angry all the time. His girlfriend was being abused at home so I allowed her to move in so she could finish high school in a safe environment. I thought that would make him happy, but it didn't. Nothing I do seems to make him happy anymore, and there are no more sweet hugs or,"Mom, I love you's: from him. In fact, there haven't been for a long time. We move around each other in the house much like my ex and I did, he like an angry lion about to strike out at me, and I like a nervous mouse. I cannot do anything, or say anything right so I have given up trying and I just go to work, do my job and come home at the end of the day, hopeful he is elsewhere so I will not incite his wrath again and hear the words that made me truly feel like my life was over, "I fucking hate you, you are the worst mother ever, I wish you would just go die."

Dear Roger: Kill Me or Cure Me?

Lately life has become a constant,"WTF?" I haven't been in my kitchen to cook in weeks, those duties have been taken over by my kids who have decided that we are going vegetarian,(they are trying to slide vegan past me), and not only is there no longer any meat in the house, what is in the house is constantly, disgustingly, healthy! No greasy snacks, no junk food, and no processed anything. I think my body has somewhat gone into shock. I do still have my coffee and that is the one saving grace I have and the fact that they have been making homemade bread and rolls and things like that to keep me from running to the nearest convenience store in search of a HoHo.
I am also getting regular exercise. Its not some 15 minutes on a treadmill kind of BS either, my best friend seems determined to walk the legs the hell off of me so we take off every evening and we walk for close to an hour. Its not some slow, meander either, we are power-walking /almost jogging and we are getting some distance on us. We walk up to Reed college and around there up to the main drag near our house and then back around and home. Its a bit wearing in crappy chucks, but I sleep like the dead when I get home and both our asses look fantastic.
Work is going good, the one problem that I was having to deal with on a fairly regular basis, decided to remove itself yesterday. When I spotted the activity and the Uhaul I happy danced all around my living room to the tune of ,"Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead", I've already started prepping an ad for their apartment and im looking forward to a drama free summer now.
My new car is pretty cool, the color is not what I would have selected if I had it to do over again, but for the time and place and the price? I would have taken it if it had been safety orange. I got it for below book and you cant beat that with a big stick. I drive my boy to work every morning and I actually enjoy that time with him. We chat a bit and then after I drop him I get to have some time to myself to just blast my music and relax.
Summer is going to be busy for all of us, my eldest is supposed to finally get off his ass and enroll in a program that is a combination of college and high school credits so he can get off my couch and stop playing Pokemon and back into doing something productive with his life.
Im finally getting caught up on all the stuff in my office and getting this place whipped into shape so it looks good. I love it here and most of the residents are great folks who simply want to just pay their rent, live their lives and enjoy their peace and quiet so I hope to be able to help them do just that. My boss isnt all over me constantly and that keeps my anxiety level low so I can get stuff done, and work as much as I need to,(or until my kids or my boy drag me out of my office), to make sure things are handled. I do love my job and my neighborhood and it makes it all worth it.
We fit in down here, there isnt the feeling of being outsiders like we had in our last neighborhood, and we are starting to meet people and get to make friends and connections outside of our own little world. My kids have friends in school and we go up to the school events and actually have fun. I think I get more of a kick out of seeing the looks on peoples faces as they try to figure out the connection between my boy and me, especially when my daughter runs up to him and asks permission from him to go do something and he answers, or when I ask if hes ready to go home? Life is good.  

Dear Roger:Achievement, Unlocked!

Im waking up another year older this morning and I actually dont have a single damn thing to whine about. I mean, over the past 3 weeks so much has happened that I have often felt that I have been riding on the back runaway bronc that I am just slightly starting to get control of, and actually I sort of enjoy it,(that daredevil bone again), so really, no complaints.
I have a fantastic new job with a company that actually supports and encourages me. The CEO is a woman, my direct supervisor is awesome and very direct and just lays it all out to me and gives me clear expectations and lets me get stuff done and there is potential to actually go places with this company,(once I find my butt with both hands), and I love my complex, even with the occasional knucklehead to deal with, its still a great place with a lot of potential in a wonderful neighborhood.
Our new apartment is wonderful, even though its a  smaller, and the carpet will be getting replaced in a few days which will be interesting with all of us living here, its still a cool apartment and we are happy here. We got rid of our tv's for the time being and its actually been good for all of us, we talk more, listen to music more and of course play games and read and just hang out more.
Like I mentioned yesterday, I have a best friend and he means the world to me. He hears all my big news before anyone else, be is bad or good and he always has something to say to make me laugh, especially if he is causing an international incident with Chile and I have to wonder if they are going to bombard us with llamas any moment due to his machinations.
My kids are doing wonderful. They are all in new schools and in my daughters school there are three gifted kids in her CLASS instead of just in her entire school! She is being kept on her toes and challenged and she comes home in a great mood and busy with schoolwork. Stubby has a male teacher and he needed that. He likes him and the work is starting to make him really focus on his schooling more. Sticky asked to go live with his father at the first of the month, and with the transition to the new neighborhood and the issues with the Oregon Sped system, and the fact that his father really finally seems to have his act sort of together, I agreed to try it for a while. It was a very difficult decision, but Sticky had been asking for a long time and shockingly the Sped programs in AZ are just soo much better than the ones in Oregon. He had a good teacher here, and the class aide was amazing, and they were awesome to him, but there was no way he was ready for 8th grade. In AZ he will be back in 7th grade again next year and back with his original cohort, and back in regular classes with an aide and his father has a work schedule that will allow him to be home with him every afternoon. My eldest son is returning to traditional High School! He likes the looks of the business program offered by the local HS and he is tired of the looks he gets from everyone when they ask what grade he is in so he decided to just return, do the accelerated program along with summer school and he hopes to graduate on time.
I finally own a car. After months and months of debating and agonizing and trying to secure financing and dealing with every shyster auto dealer in town, I found a program called Wheels to Work thanks to a woman at Gresham Ford and I applied for it, went through all the steps,(harder than getting a home mortgage), qualified, and as of day before yesterday, I went back to Gresham Ford and I bought my car from the same lady who referred me to the program. I have an Oregon drivers license license now as well,(finally!), thanks to the support and kindness,(and nagging), of friends and family and the program, and I am working on getting all my student loans sorted out so I can finish my Masters Degree.
I also plan to sit down this weekend and pull up that long ignored file on my desktop and finish the editing so I can finally publish my 4th novel.
All in all I think I have finally hit my stride.

Dear Roger: Everybody Needs One

I have spent most of my life without something most people take for granted, large in part to my stand-offish nature, my inability to trust people deeply enough, and just the complications of my life not allowing it, but I have discovered over the last few months that I finally have something I have long needed; a best friend.
He didn't start out that way, in fact I had a horrible crush on him, but having a horrible crush on a gay man is like shopping in a high end store with no money, its fruitless,(snort!) and gets you nothing but frustrated and maybe arrested when you finally snap and start grabbing the goods. The feelings have changed though and I don't know how to explain how or why, but maybe its because they have grown and matured? Dont get me wrong, I love him with all my heart and I enjoy spending time with him more than anyone else, but I have no expectations and there is no pressure or stress anymore. Its fun because often we check out the same guys.
Hes funny and kind and compassionate, but he also brings a good dose of reality and practicality to my life. He's the Yin to my Yang, the mellow to my harsh, and when I am having a day full of stress and pressure, he just seems to know the right words to make me laugh and relax.
He reminds me very much of you and sometimes that makes my heart ache a lot, but then I am soo damn grateful he is in my life because my kids love him. Stubby and Monkey girl have told him many times that he would be a fantastic daddy and while he shudders in horror when they say that, he has stepped into that role for them and they have pulled him into our little family kicking and screaming and made him part of us. When he is late for dinner we worry and all of our talk of future plans include him.
I am very protective of him, just like I am of any of my family, and I have a hard time not flying to his defense when I feel he is being wronged or taken advantage of, but like he has told me, I am the master of passive aggressive, so those who wrong him will eventually feel it.
He listens to me when I rant and when I talk about mistakes I have made and he doesn't judge, he may tease me gently and he may even point out things that show my age and call me "Mrs. Robinson", but its never mean like some try to be, his humor is actually witty and leaves me laughing. I have done soo many fun things with him I thought I would never do, like going to a Burlesque show,(twice now!), going to and singing Karaoke, going to the opening of an art exhibit downtown at night, going to Comicon, doing the Aids Walk, and applying for a much better job and moving to the neighborhood I always wanted to move to in Portland and finally applying for and getting the loan for a car. Yeah...if not for him, I wouldn't have been able to do that stuff because every step of the way, when I doubted myself or there was some roadblock in my way, my best friend was right there beside me to help me move it out of my way and to keep me moving forward.

Dear Roger:Keeping Them Off The Pole

I made my daughter write a letter of apology to our neighbor yesterday. She initially wasn't very happy about it, but after she was done and we talked about it, she told me she understood why she had to do it, and that it was the right thing to do. She hadn't done a really horrible thing, but she had been disrespectful and rude, and that is not how I have raised her to be. All she had done was say as the woman was walking away was,"I don't think that old lady likes kids very much." I had tried to stop her from saying the words,"old lady" but she just bulled on ahead and said them loud enough the woman and other neighbors heard them. The woman was walking away at a brisk pace, headed to some meeting, so I didn't stop her and have my daughter apologize then, I sent my daughter home and told her she would be writing an apology letter. I've had my kids do such a thing before, and I have had them apologize in person when possible. Its not an easy thing but we always sit and discuss it afterwards. My daughter asked me if I have ever written an apology letter and I admitted that I have. I have written two, both to the same person, both were brutally hard to write and neither received an acknowledgement so I never even knew if my apology was accepted which is worse than what she had to endure, because shortly after she put the letter on the woman's door, her tutor came home and told us that there was a note on our door. The woman had received her apology, accepted it and told her no harm was done and they were friends.
Teaching manners and genteel behavior may seem outdated, but I think its important that they know proper behavior and have a moral code. Sometimes in the past mine has lapsed and I did and said things that were rude or in poor form and I've worked hard to refrain from making those same mistakes and to atone for the wrongs I committed.
 Observing some of the behavior I have witnessed on the internet has made me very aware that there is a serious lack of a moral code among a large part of society that encompasses all generations. I have heard people of my age wish a young man dead over a social media site, call people names that they wouldn't dare say in person, and celebrate behavior that even someone of my rather colorful and checkered past finds a bit beyond the pale. I don't know...maybe I just grew up a bit too Southern, a bit too small town Texas, a bit too traditional, but I long for the days when I didn't have to worry about my son getting cat assholes gauged into his ears, or my 9 year old wouldn't have a clue that the boy she looked up to smoked weed and drank because she had seen videos and comments on YouTube and she,"Knows a drunk guy when she sees one!" . We have had long talks about alcohol and drugs and what all those things lead to, and they are well aware due to where we came from, but I remind them that those things take away a persons control and reason and lead to many bad things like disease, harming innocents, and behavior that could change a persons life forever. I really wish I didn't have to have these conversations with a 9 year old, but the world we live in has changed and she sees drunk people almost daily, she smells weed all the time, she had a father who used drugs, and she is well aware of the seedier side of life and she doesn't want it.
She was working on algebra last night with her tutor so she will be ahead. She was thrilled to get a vintage sewing machine for her birthday and she wants to learn how to sew in order to be able to make,"Fancy party dresses", she nags at her brothers about always dressing their best and staying presentable, using their manners and being,"Gentlemen", so hopefully she will always remember to be a young lady.
The apology letter was a reminder that in her efforts to get ahead in the world she has to remember that there are other people in the world with her and it is my hope that she will grow to be the kind of person that tries to help them and if she cannot help them, she damn sure wont hurt them. That is what I have worked hard to achieve for myself these last few years and while its a struggle every single day, and I am still atoning, I haven't had to write an apology letter lately.

Dear Roger: Monkey Team Switch?

So my little monkey girl is now 9, only shes not so little anymore and im not so sure she is still a monkey girl. Her party had an odd mixed theme of a,"Glittery Unicorn pooping a rainbow" cake,accompanied by,"My Lil Pony" plates and settings, and then we had karaoke and sushi. She really didn't ask for any presents, in fact she mainly just wanted time with her friends and family and to get out of the house to have some fun. She sang a few Katy Perry songs, a Kesha song and on a dare she sang the CeLo Green song,"F-You". That one was oddly enthusiastic and considering she had to be really careful to not actually cuss, I was surprised she belted out as confidently as she did. All the songs she sang were about either being left, breaking up or the end of something and I hope its not her saying,"Goodbye" to being the sweet little girl she has always been.
Shes a tough kid now and she flips her brothers the business, is scornful of most men and she has a temper. She also hates making mistakes. Some of her most dramatic shows of temper have come when she has been challenged by her tutor to do something that is far above her academic level, and she either doesn't get it exactly perfect or he points out some way it could have been better instead of telling her it was absolutely perfect, but he has her doing college level work that is designed to challenge her to the point of failure so she will learn how to overcome it. She is excited about going to Gifted Camp this summer and plans on doing everything she can to show them that she should be looked at for additional scholarships and programs to challenge her. She is getting frustrated with her school and we she saw me bring home some information about apartments downtown near better schools, she got excited and hopeful. I hate that the fact we live in a suburb and don't have a car limits her ability to get a quality education.
Friends tried to get her favorite boy to tweet her, but he didn't and honestly, I didn't figure he would and she didn't even notice. She was too busy with her tutor and her friends and I'm pretty sure she has started to see him as just another man. Her one comment that even referenced him was when she thanked everyone for coming to her party and she said,"Thanks for coming and helping make up for the total suckage of last year, at least no one ruined it this year for me by killing my favorite band!" We all laughed and went about enjoying our sushi, but I was shocked. She has never been snarky like that before. She almost left her jackson hanging on the back of the chair at the sushi restaurant, and while she still hangs onto him, she worries more about Graupner and is still hopeful I will figure out someway to take her to SBL in June so she can give him a hug.
I dont know what is bringing about the change in her, maybe its that shes finally realized the boy she adored has wandered off on down some path she cannot follow and until he finds his way back its best she just move on along her on that leads ever upwards.

Dear Roger: Excuse Me While I Talk With The Voices In My Head

Being a writer is a bit of a mental illness. When I have a plot or a story line I am chasing, I often wrestle it around for days, sometimes talking it out. The characters can be difficult to get into, with their motivations and lives changing with the stroke of a pen and it can be frustrating to figure out what direction my muse is trying to push me. My kids are used to me talking out loud or muttering and scribbling on odd bits of paper, looking frustrated and sometimes typing so hard on my computer that my son makes noises of distress and says,"Are you beating someone up again or mad at another character? You are punishing your computer!" He has learned that computers do not last long with me, often having keys bare of their letters with worn spots where the wrist rest is, odd coffee stains on the screen and a search history full of topics that he has learned to never click on if he values his sanity as a hetero male.
When I have writers block its not fun to be around me. I get morose and grumpy, struggling to figure out what has happened to stop the flow of words. I've had writers block for most of the last 9 months and its been so bad I haven't even dared to touch one of my stories that was finished and only in need of its final editing for fear of launching into a hissy fit driven melee of destruction along the lines of the,"Great Artistic Bonfire of '91" that took out most of my photography and artwork. I have another story that I had been sharing online with some friends that I left with the characters lingering in a very tenuous position, and my inclination has been to have them end it all in a passionate, rage driven murder/suicide. Yet when I mention what my potential end is for them, my faithful readers do not react well and honestly, it would break my heart to end them, but every time I open the the files that is what I see happening so I have left it alone.
I started writing another story a while back about a young musician who turned to street hustling to survive, and its actually flowing pretty well on occasion. There has been a young man who wanders   past the office on occasion that fuels ideas for his mis-adventures, so I may actually be able to do something with this one, but between work and kids and doctors appointments its hard to keep the focus.
I have written 3 songs and a friend of mine who saw them was impressed, but I don't know what to do with them. Ill probably just give them to my son or daughter or maybe enter them in some contest in the next year if I find the time, but its weird how they come to me. I used to write and sometimes perform Cowboy Poetry,(a looong time ago), and the songwriting comes to me much like the poetry from back then did. I still have many of those poems I wrote and maybe someday my kids will do something with them. My son seems pretty intrigued by them and hes got the musical bone as does my little girl.
Had another doctors appointment the other day to try and figure out where the hell the bruises and the exhaustion might be coming from. They drew SIX damn tubes of blood off of me after telling me that even with all the cooking and eating ive been doing that I've neither lost nor gained any weight. At least Im holding steady, so I will see that as a positive, though summer is coming and I tend to shed weight in summer pretty badly. The doctor had them test me for liver function, platelets, cbc, thyroid, and then she asked if she could test me for a couple of diseases I haven't been tested for in a few years. I told her that even though its been a long dry spell she might as well as its better to be safe than sorry and with 11 years in public safety spent mucking around in the mud,blood beer and various body fluids on accident scenes and dead body calls its probably a good idea.
My little girl has her party on the 9th and she is really excited. The only kids that are going are her siblings and while that might be odd for most kids, for her its really not.She hasn't asked for anything other than the party and that is just one of the things I love about her so damn much. With her its not about things, its about time spent with loved ones. I know she really would like a new computer,(hell, we all would!) but she doesn't ask and when she does finally snap and have a bratty moment, she always apologizes and hugs the person she snapped at,(usually her tutor), and often cries because she is upset at herself. She is growing up so fast and even with the changes over this last year she is still my sweet monkey girl.

Dear Roger: The Last Monkey Birthday?

She is growing up. Oh God, she is growing up. She is still the sweet, kind, loving little girl she has always been, but she has a snarky edge to her that she didn't have last year. She has slammed doors, thrown pencils in frustration and she sassed back at her tutor more than a few times and she adores him. She is leaving her Jackson home more and more and gradually accepting that the little band of men she loved have totally abandoned her. She is getting tougher and she has endured bullying at school like the tough monkey girl she is and no longer does she come home in tears, retreating to her room to cuddle her monkey under her blankets, now she rants and stomps and tells me about how she restrained herself from,"Stomping a mudhole" in the bully's butt, (I may have rubbed off on her a little bit), and she is holding her head up higher, though she still has days when she just wants to cuddle Benny and mope for a bit.
She got a scholarship to go to a camp for Gifted children this summer and for some reason the school district has been doing more testing on her and they have reaffirmed she is "Intellectually and Creatively Gifted", though I don't know why they feel the need to keep testing her for it. She reads constantly, draws and sings,(quite often very inappropriate songs), and her tutor works with her on college level vocabulary words and concepts just to provide a challenge to her. She is very used to always getting 100% and being told how brilliant she is so actually being provided a challenge where she sometimes fails is good for her, though its not good for door frames or pencils. My child has an ego and it does not accept failure very well and we are teaching her how to fail and come back from it, though the process is heart rending for all of us.
She has cut her hair this past year, gotten her ears pierced, traveled to Seattle, made new friends, stood up to her brothers, suffered heartbreak and realized that heroes are just human beings who sometimes forget that they are heroes to little girls and go back to being human beings. She has decided she wants to grow up to be a hero herself and she is a fierce defender of those she sees as needing her protection, including her tutor and even her long lost hero's for some odd reason.
I don't know what the future is going to hold for her in this next year, but I do know it is going to be full of amazing things. We are celebrating her birthday on Saturday with Karaoke, a cake in the shape of a,"Glittery Unicorn Pooping a Rainbow" , followed by a dinner of Sushi with friends at her favorite Japanese restaurant. She hasn't asked for any presents, just fun with friends because she said she has everything she wants and needs. If you arent busy on Saturday, join us on Twitter, send her a Happy Birthday, she will appreciate it. @calamityjen1

Dear Roger: Cant Tell Me Nothing About Kids

Twenty years ago I would have considered myself an absolute failure as a mother. I read all the articles and advice columns that were supposed to provide me with sage advice on how to raise my baby and none of them fit my situation. I was a young, new college student struggling to deal with being the first in my family to have a child out of wedlock,(HUGE shame on my very Southern, very Texan family), dealing with pressure from the father who wanted me to either give up the child to him so he could send her to his family overseas,(she is bi-cultural, Domi-Iranian), and my parents who wanted her and my health that was still in horrible condition after dealing with toxemia and then post-partum depression that was never ending. I was poor, struggling to find daycare so I could attend classes, and alone in Dallas...no "Momblog" or column covered these issues in 1991, in fact they are barely addressed today. The issues resolved themselves and my daughter is now a smart, successful, 21 year old woman for whom the most pressing decision is trying to decide if she wants to use her full-ride scholarship to attend Texas A&M or UT-Austin or if she wants to go to University of Arizona and give us all heart attacks. She is well adjusted, beautiful, spooky smart,(think Sheldon from Big Bang Theory smart), and shes learned from my mistakes. She is in no hurry to date,and she is not the only one of my kids to have that idea.
Being a mother was never my goal in life, I just kind of fell into it. My now 17 year old son came of terrible circumstances from a terrible man, and before he was born our lives were filled with terror and things like packing up and relocating in the middle of the night, leaving all my friends behind, changing vehicles and always looking over my shoulder, avoiding my own family's homes, all for his safety. His birth was a quiet, unannounced event. No baby announcements grace his baby book because when you are being stalked by a madman who has vowed to kill your child, you tend to not send them out. We lived below the radar for years, but that issue was actually sort of covered in things like movies,"Sleeping With The Enemy", though we never had a really nice house, we moved from one apartment to another. Still most journalists don't bother to cover the issues that come with that kind of situation, like "How to Exist Without Child Support", "Jobs That Will Hire Single Moms In The Real World", "Meals You Can Make Out of Ramen and Canned Veggis", because that was our reality. I worked 3 jobs at a time and we still struggled until I got back into college. I am pretty pleased with how he has turned out, hes also gifted, with technology and music being his blessing, and hes been with the same girl for 3 years and they are a cute, sweet couple that will probably end up getting married. Somehow along the way he ended up religious and  they both believe in waiting til marriage,(can I get a Hallelujah!), so he also learned from my life.
Now that im older and I have my last 3 kids I look at some of the,"Parenting Experts" with their one or two toddlers and I laugh. They live in fancy houses in L.A., New York, or Boston or in some safe, gated community with their husbands and their 2.5 dogs and their aupair to handle the crappy diapers, and they have Gymboree and ballet and whine about being out of wine or how hard it is to get to the park past the people eating their lunch and they write on their Macbooks about,"The Over Scheduled Toddler". I was showing some of these to my boss the other day and we were laughing about their trials and travails, (between us we have 17 children), and we have handled things like bad men, children with disabilities, serious illness, death, abject poverty, and  thinking of our kids first, last and always. We both look like the moms we are, neither of us have a bit of make-up on, when people ask us if we have had spa-days or make overs or things like that we both laugh. Though the days of poop in the heater vents, Legos down the commode, booger walls and toast in dvd player are hopefully behind us, I now have to deal with things like 3 boys in full on puberty and a daughter that is just a the edge of it. Door slamming, hissy fits, epic brawls, battles, emotional outbursts that devolve into semi-homicidal rages against stuffies, hour long showers that leave the bathroom in a dubious state, socks in weird places in weird condition that I pick up with tongs and just discard, a boy who is very proud of his new body hair and junk and wants to show it off to EVERYONE, a girl who knows the words to very inappropriate songs and sings them under her breath and crushes on gay men and tells me I should,"Marry him, he would be a good daddy," not understanding he is just not into that AT ALL!
Yeah, somehow all the bloggers and journalists miss those issues. Maybe I should write about them, but sadly I am not sure we meet the dress code to get popular, after all, my boys mainly are clad in Old Navy, though my daughter is the lucky one to have a closet stuffed with Gymboree and Gap, as well as Harjuku Mini thanks to the kindness of some friends. Ill think on it,between the dishes and laundry and work and refereeing, and ....

Dear Roger: Soft In My Old Age

I'm turning into a wuss. Right now I should be getting dressed to take Benny over to the vet for his neutering and I cannot do it. Its not because I am against him getting neutered, that is an inevitable thing that I will do because its the responsible thing to do as a pet parent, but knowing it will cause him pain, and knowing he will be scared because he will be away from me is what is putting the brakes on me being able to do it. He is currently cuddled up against me with one of his paws draped over me, snoring as I type.
Yesterday my little girl got her ears pierced. Our friends went along as moral support and her tutor held her hand while she clutched her Jackson in the other while I took pictures of the event. I cried, though not as bad as I did when she cut her hair for the very first time. It was acknowledging she is finally growing up. She was fine with the whole ordeal, no tears from her and just some giddy excitement about getting some earrings with monkeys on them.
Yesterday for the first time we had my eldest sons girlfriend over to dinner. I am finally working on developing a peaceful relationship with her. I guess after nearly 3 years its about time to admit shes actually not a bad person. Shes really not, shes a very sweet girl, who has been very sheltered. My main complaint the whole time that they had dated was that as a very sheltered church girl, she would be just like the people in the church who were so judgmental and hypocritical towards us, but she is not. She actually got along well with my boys,(who teased her pretty hard), and she joined in as best she could due to no voice. We cooked dinner together and she seems to be actually really good for my son. I guess I am mellowing because to add to the weirdness of last night, the meal we cooked was totally Vegan.
My life has been strange since I got here in Portland, but yesterday was pretty high up on the strange stuff o meter for me. But, being Im probably one of the few mothers in the the world who had objected to her son dating a vegan, sheltered, always chaperoned, church girl, I guess weird is the norm? I will admit I have totally reconsidered my objections after considering the alternatives and I am thrilled with his girlfriend. She has a scholarship to college, she has goals for the future, and she is a good cook and polite, classy and she held her own with my crew. I look forward to getting to know her.
Ill have to reschedule Benny for a time when either Chance can take him or I can bribe my boys into taking him, but for now im going to cuddle him and just look the other way when he humps the hell out of Finn the Valhund.

Dear Roger:Never Pee Alone

When you become a parent for the first time and you are all in, dedicated to the little life that is dependent upon you, one of the first bits of privacy you lose is your time alone in the bathroom. I remember as a young single mom, exhausted and stressed about every little thing I thought I was doing wrong, being worried that if my baby boy was out of my sight for even the length of time it took to take a pee, that either he would somehow choke to death on air, smother under his Tigger doll, magically rise up and then fall out of his crib then breaking his neck, or that the apartment would catch on fire and I wouldn't be there to save him, so I carried him everywhere with me, including into the bathroom. Its a proven fact that babies hate the thought of their parents taking a shower that lasts longer than 5 minutes, and he trained me to become the worlds fastest at washing, shaving the high points, drying enough to get clothes back on and then back to serving his needs before he reached full scream.
When my child became a toddler, I didn't dare leave him alone or loose in the house without supervision even if I thought he was occupied by something. I learned the hard way that a child seemingly occupied by the Wiggles one moment is the next moment often found, naked, armed with a butcher knife that was on top of the fridge, and running down a busy sidewalk screaming that he is a "NINJA!!". When I had 3 children under the age of 5 I reached the point I could go most of the day without a bathroom break and that showers at 3 a.m really aren't that bad even when interrupted by a sleepwalking toddler who casually takes a pee in the bathroom commode, leaving the door open, letting in the giant dog who then sticks his head in the shower and stands there the rest of the time staring at you while you try to finish shaving legs that haven't seen the attention of a razor for the better part of a month.
When we lived in a 1 bathroom apartment after we first moved to Portland, it was nothing short of hell. I had 5 people, 3 of them boys trying to share a bathroom, and 2 of them are consummate lock pickers. My daughter has no fear,(except of peeing her pants), and she got tired of her teen brother taking multiple half hour long showers where he would lock everyone out of the bathroom and then pretend to be deaf to our pleas. She finally just began picking the lock, going in, taking care of her business and quite often flushing a couple times for good measure just to hear him shriek. She does the same to me now that we share a bathroom, quite often wanting to carry on a conversation about whatever is going on in her life. I find it a bit distressing. The kids wander in and out with each other in the bathrooms now that we have two, and you would think that I would have some privacy, finally, but it doesn't work out that way. When I am getting ready for work in the mornings I have Benny my Boston Terrier who insists on following into the bathroom and on a couple of occasions almost into the shower as I get ready, if I lock him out, he sits outside and scratches at the door and howls until my daughter gets up and lets him in. My eldest son, when he wakes up around the same time as me is often peppering me with questions about money, my younger kids are at the door asking for help with clothes or news of what is going to be for dinner or what we are doing when they get home, its often a hunt to find who took my shaving gel, where the shampoo has gone off to, and the investigation into why my towel is wet, most of the time I dont want to know and I just end up hoping for my allotted 5 minutes , try to convince Benny that I need to shower alone, and hope that I answered all questions and phone calls before the water hits the right temperature.

Dear Roger: Nerdy As Hell, Loyal To The Bone or Stuck In A Rut?

My job requires me to judge people. I talk to them, take their applications for a home, listen to their stories if their history is less than stellar and I make a decision if I want to let them be my neighbor. I have laws I have to obey, and once I follow those laws, then I am allowed to rely on my gut instinct to make my decisions and some of the people I have chosen to be my neighbors were not people most would expect. I've chosen a woman who came from very similar circumstances as my own, and she had been rejected time and time again and she was at the end of her rope when she walked through my door. I could have rejected her as well, but my gut told me to give her a chance, because I looked at her and saw myself nearly 3 years ago. She is a great resident almost 6 months later. There are plenty of other cases where I have gone with my gut and rented to people, or advocated for them, and they have proven me right time and time again in spite of where they came from or what they looked like. I am a person who puts great stock in the impression I get from meeting a person, talking to them, looking them in the eyes, seeing how they behave around children and others. There are people who have walked in and screened fine but I did not want to rent to them because my gut told me they were going to be trouble, and to the person they have been. If the laws allowed me more power to depend on my gut, I would have a lot less drama and hassle in my life. I interviewed, then gave a tour to and ultimately rented an apartment to, a stripper the other day. My gut tells me she is going to be a great neighbor and when she was embarrassed about telling me her job, I was quick to tell her there was no shame in working for a living.

When I have met a person, shook their hand, spoken to them, observed them up close and watched the body language and micro-gestures they use in their communication with the people around them, seen the subtle cues that give me indications of their personality quirks, whether or not they use drugs or have health issues, or even obsessive tics, I get a feel for that person that remains with me and I decide right then and there where that person ranks in my realm of importance or if they are even worthy of me remembering their name for more than a day or two. I do not change that opinion lightly and once I decide that person is worthy of consideration, they are included in my little pack of those I tend to stay loyal to and hold up for consideration. 

Im loyal to a few things. I've worn the same style of clothing for most of my life, I used Works for my writing until I had to change to a computer last year and could no longer get it. I had a qwerty slide out keyboard phone until a little over a year ago when it unfortunately went swimming in a bad, bad place. I still love the same little band of broken and frayed and largely missing; musicians. I have loved the same damn man for over 15 years to no avail. I don't know so much if I am a creature of habit or just stuck in a rut, but I do tend to be understanding of people for the most part and when one of my friends was angrily,(and rightfully so), complaining, that she felt unappreciated as a fangirl who had put forth a huge amount of effort to garner support for some of our favorite fellas, I found myself being an apologist for them. I don't know what the hell is going on with them either, but I tend to be forgiving. I've had very fucked up things going on in my life from time to time when I just chose to withdraw from the world and not talk to anyone,(no matter what damage it did), and yes, my book sales have suffered for it, but when you just don't have it in you to give, you don't and cant and yes, sometimes even a tweet is a lot. Depression, anger, family heartbreak, all kinds of things just can crash in or sometimes life just changes and you find another path and wander it for awhile. I've been doing that and my latest novel has sat on my desktop for the last 3 months, completed, ready to go and im not ready to send it because I have lost the voice for the time being. I've been writing something else and until it figures itself out, im going to wander. I hope my friend gets over her upset at them, its been a long, crazy trip and our band of miscreants has shrunk far to much by those who obviously never shook those hands and said,"Hello", face to face. 

Dear Roger: Monkey Says, "Boys Are Weird!" and That Makes Me Happy

I'm trying to start planning for Stevie's 9th birthday. No matter what happens, I want it to be better than last years and I want it to erase the sadness and loss she felt when her favorite band broke up right before her birthday last year. She already has plans with our boys to go out to Karaoke for an epic day of singing at the Voicebox, followed by Sushi and then shopping in the Alphabet District and the Pearl. I had considered trying to contact her favorite boys management folk and seeing if I could buy her an autographed picture or something, but I have no idea who to contact anymore. I'm going to buy her the music I can find from what are left of the band boys, and the movies I can track down, and then the big event of the day is that the boys and I will be taking her to finally getting her ears pierced.
She asked them to go with her and hold her hands while she gets it done and she really looks up to them. I may tell her then that we are driving to Madison, Wisconsin in June for the Spencer Bell Legacy concert and that she is actually going to get to go. We had been planning on flying in and just attending the concert and flying back home, but now we will be driving the high Northern route, doing the tourist thing on the way there and coming back the Southern route and doing the same so in order to expose her to the maximum amount of states and cool things.
The boys have brought so much fun and happiness to our lives. The humor and laughter that flows around our home is a daily occurrence and we all seem to be doing better for the experience. We have dinner together every night and Stevie has a tutor for her penmanship and other homework who takes the time to challenge her intellect. My sons have found kindred spirits for their video gaming geekiness and I have found friends who share my love of Zombies and comic books and who enjoy teasing my eldest son about his stick up the butt personality so he is actually starting to relax and joke back. They tease me about my lack of girl skills and then actually help me sort of figure out how not to be so butch. They are male companionship and friendship that we all needed and they are expanding our world in new and exciting ways and I like to think we are doing the same for them.
We are going to Comic Con together this next week, something I would not have normally done with the kids before I met them, and that is a sign of just how far we have come. They brought it up yesterday right after they walked through the door and handed me my belated Valentines present, a stuffie that is a sperm cell. Stevie looked up from where she was saw the stuffie, rolled her eyes and said,"You guys are weird, just WEIRD!" Causing all of us to turn and stare at her asking how in the hell she knew what it was, to which she replied, "Science, DUH!"
Our lives have become a very strange and joyful tangle and among the chaos we have found our routines and rhythms that work quite well for us and my kids are the happiest they have been in years.
Going to SBL has always been a pipedream of ours, something I promised my little girl we would do,"Some day" and I had never in my life thought it would be in such an amazing manner, in fact I had even despaired making it while my health held out or it was even still going on. The planning and saving up for it is on-going and with the hotel room already paid for, the account for travel set up and slowly gaining meager funds, I am feeling lighter and more hopeful that life has finally stopped being about plodding from one mission to the next and has finally become about finding the joy, in fact, they told me that our next goal is to start saving up for the British Isles after SBL, I may actually get to leave the country while still alive?! How freaking amazing is that??!

Dear Roger: Who's The One Monkey Loves? Don't You Dare Ask!

My little girl is at that age where she is developing her sense of self and what people mean to her. She has had her first little girl crush on a celebrity and that started very young when she began looking up to Jackson Rathbone as her hero. I don't think she saw him as someone she saw as a cute/romantic type crush at first. He was someone she looked up to as her big brother/replacement male role model since she really didn't have a male role model when she was a little girl. That all changed this past year as she has started to have some hormones kick in and she has been around older girls who have influenced her to see men differently. It was very shocking to me when she first looked at a picture of him and said,"Whoa...hes CUTE!" I actually didn't like hearing her say that. I much preferred her seeing him as someone she looked at as a bit of a hero, that is until he pretty much just dropped out of sight.
That has been rough on her. She has had men do that to her for her entire life. Her big brother was gone for over a year when he went to Texas to live with family. Her father left in 2007 when she was just barely four  for prison due to domestic violence and child abuse. I haven't brought men around or dated because I didn't want that constant daddy of the week experience for her or my boys and she has not had any grandparents around in her life, so her male role models have been a flighty, erstwhile rockstar/actor, her abusive father, and her older brother who has issues of his own, that is until very recently.
Just over a year ago we had a couple move into our apartment complex that I just had a gut feeling about. I knew they were decent, good people and I was determined to become friends with them. Its been a slow progression, but over the last few months we have become very close and good friends and I count them as cherished and needed parts of our family now.
My daughter adores them, in fact all my kids do. We have family game nights with them, dinner together almost every night, and we do things together on an almost daily basis. If they aren't over, they are missed.
My little girl has a crush on them and its cute to watch her light up when they show up at the door. She used to shyly watch them when they would walk their little dog, always careful to stay out of sight, never actually speaking to them but racing to tell me the moment they appeared,"MOM!! THEY ARE OUT THERE IN THEIR PENGUIN JAMMIES TODAY!!"  each and every time they would show up with the dog in the early hours for its morning constitutional.
When they first started coming over for dinner, she sat at the table and didn't speak, she just side-eyed them and blushed, rushing away to go lurk in her room, creeping into the kitchen to get herself a drink and pretend like she wasn't watching them. When she did finally start talking to them, she lit up like a 1000 watt bulb. She joked and teases them, and even flips their gay humor back at them. Its quite cute to see, and they graciously include her in our outings and involve her in many fun things that she has really wanted to do. When they invited her to karaoke, I thought she was going to burst with joy. She has a little girl crush on at least one of them, and he is very aware of it, and he is very careful not to encourage it nor to totally crush her heart. She knows he is gay, she knows what that means, but it still doesn't mean she doesn't absolutely adore him and his partner with all her little girl heart. What is really amazing and wonderful is that he takes time each and every evening to help her with her homework and he is tutoring her in her spelling and penmanship, in other words, spending important time, teaching her important things, and he is a guy who doesn't yell, who doesn't cuss at her, who doesn't cruelly make fun of her, and who most important of all, treats her like an important human being. He gently teases her, and sometimes she gets annoyed and stomps off in an annoyed little hissy fit, and he lets her, because as he reminded me, she doesn't get her way every time.
She jealously guards her time with them and when her brothers come around and want to hang out with the guys or try to horn in on planned outings, she gets angry, and often says,'HEY! Its girl time!', though Stubby is not easily dissuaded because he is very fond of the guys as well and the battles sometimes get pretty dramatic and require intervention.  The guys are gamers and they enjoy talking video gaming with  my eldest and youngest sons, (something my daughter doesn't much care for), and the nights the gaming talk gets prolonged she gets testy and tends to inflict payback on her brothers later, but for the most part, they manage to share the company without much bloodshed and  inflict only psychological harm via payback via Munchkin and hopefully I can keep her convinced to limit the harm to that arena.
I commented to her the other night that she seems to not being paying attention to Jackson so much anymore. I asked her if she replacing him with the guys? That was apparently the WRONG thing to ask. I upset her. I was informed in no uncertain terms that she is not like that, that she does not see people as replaceable or disposable and that she did not find my question to be funny or fair. She informed me that much like I had told her a year ago when the great band schism occurred that I was to quote a lame movie line,"Switzerland" and refusing to choose sides because I loved everyone and could never pick sides in a fight I knew nothing about, she could not simply stop loving or caring for someone simply because they chose to disappear from her life. "I miss him and Ben and Jerad and all of them soo very, very much and if it would do any good I would be on twitter and Facebook every day begging them to come back, but they don't talk to me anymore, they ignore me. Ben is even gone now and Jerad only does weird quotes I don't understand and Jackson said he was going to tour , but then he hasn't  and Ben said he was going to tour but then he quit talking. I just don't know who to believe or listen to anymore. I know that Joel and Chris are here, they talk to me, they tell me they are going to come over and they do. They tell me we are going to go do karaoke and we go. They tell me my birthday isn't going to suck this year and I believe them. I know I am glad I have friends I can trust to talk to me and to tell me the truth and keep their word, they give me hope." Knowing they give my little girl hope makes me love them all the more and makes them among the best men I know.

Dear Roger: Is 17 The Edge of The End Of Sanity?

What the hell is it about the age 17 and boys that causes all of them to seemingly lose their ever loving minds? My eldest son turned 17 in December and it has been nothing but drama and lunacy ever since. He is brilliant and gifted and can play just about any damn musical instrument he cares to pick up, teaches himself advanced computer programming and even fixes and rebuilds computers for the hell of it, can discuss and argue politics and religion with adults to the point that he is now a moderator on several posting sites because of his alleged maturity, yet, he freaking dropped out of high school.
Hes a good looking, intelligent, and when it comes to others; kind, young man, but he will torture his baby sister to tears for no apparent reason other than he for some reason thinks she is the favorite child and he has to balance the equation by being hateful to her.  He will be snide and mean and damn right cruel to her for days and then out of the blue tell her that her favorite boy is going to be on some tv show and set up the scheduler on tv so she wont miss it.  He curses my dog and makes dire threats towards his very life, but then he will sit and cuddle him for hours when Benny isn't feeling well after getting a shot. I would suspect him of being bi-polar, but hes been tested and talked to and evaluated and other than some issues related to what we all went through back in Arizona, he is perfectly,"Normal".
If that is normal, I am terrified because I have 2 more boys about to enter fully into their teen years and it is not a barrel of laughs, especially for a small, scrawny, single mom. Things have been better with my two friends around because they have become mentors of sorts to the boys and with a couple of male role models around everyone seems to be enjoying things a lot more. They tease my son about his,"Stick up the butt" mentality and make him actually participate in things like game night, and they make him socialize, and they tease him about all kinds of things that he needed teasing about. I know he has blown off time with his girlfriend to hang out with them and to spend game night around, and though I didn't realize it at the time, he really did want to go to Karaoke with us even though he never committed. Hes been kinder to my daughter as well, at least when they are around.
They are why I kind of have hope that my son will hopefully turn into a sort of sane human being once he navigates his teen years. Though I have seen examples of young men who just wallow in one disaster  after another, these guys seem to have their shit together and they are successful and fairly well adjusted and my son looks up to at least one of them, all my kids do.
We have adopted them into our rather odd family and they are here every night for dinner, we spend time together every day and they are going to the Spencer Bell Legacy concert with me in June. Its been great for us, and hopefully good for them. Having friends that I can socialize with and that my kids look up to and enjoy being around is an amazing thing, and if they can help my wayward son figure out his life, then all the better.  I have hopes that the influence of the two seemingly sane and normal men around will have a calming and stabilizing influence on my sons, especially my eldest, but I really don't know. I do know that when they are around his fits of temper and his bullying of all of us are stifled, and he gets called on his bullshit, but there are days I despair him ever turning into any kind of tolerable human being. Tonight is a perfect example, he is ensconced in his room, playing Assassins Creed on a flat screen tv that I pay for, on internet pay for, utilizing a set of sound dampening head phones that cut off all contact with the outside world, and woe be unto him who dares to interrupt him in his battles. He rages and screams at the little kids or even me, slamming things around and slamming doors to the point that the walls shake throwing a fit like a toddler denied a toy just because he was asked to tell me where he put my Iphone cord. There are times I want to just tell him to take the things he actually has bought himself and leave, that would be less than a backpacks full of things, yet he acts like he is the most put upon waif to ever walk the earth. He is not in school, he is not working, and getting him to do even the basic of household chores involves major cajoling. I don't know where I went wrong with him, other than to say I spoiled him like many Texas mothers tend to do their first born sons, and now I am paying the piper for it. I hate to say it but I am just counting down the months to him turning 18 and hoping with age comes wisdom, sanity, or maybe a realization that hes got it a lot better than he realized.

Dear Roger: Monkey is Questioning

Its been a month of constant questions around here. The company I work for is unpredictable and thus the situation with my job is constantly up in the air, and being that this company employs a practice of evicting former employees within 24 hours, my living situation is up in the air as well. I'm working on changing all of that. I've redone my resume and I have been actively seeking other employment, some in the same line of work, some outside of it. My boss knows im looking and why. I never just sit back and rely on anything so I just like to have a fall back plan.
I've been enjoying my life even with all the upheaval. I've gone out with my friends and they are over quite a bit to visit, and we dog sit for them to keep their new puppy from being stuck at home alone all day long. Its not only good for the puppy, its good for Benny, as he has a couple of playmates to keep him occupied during the day. He's a very social little dog and hes made a few friends around the complex both human and dog, with his favorites being a Jack Russell named,"Jay" oddly enough, and a Cockapoo named "Milo". He would get to play with them more but he tends to try to hump everything and steal their toys. I've decided that Ill probably have him neutered this next month to cut down on the random humping of everything and everyone, even though the thought of him being cut on makes my stomach flip over because I do love him so very much.
My daughter has been quite a source of gray hairs this month. She has developed a bit of a crush on my friends and while she understands they are a gay couple, it doesn't change they fact they are quite cute and she is quite smitten. Shes only 8, so its one of those sweet little crushes where she writes their names with little hearts and butterflies around them and rainbows all around, she does everything she can to stall and stay up late so she can hang out with them and visit and she just so happens to leave her homework out so her favorite can check it over and just so happen to find a mistake she will need to correct with his help! Considering she has always gotten perfect scores on her homework previously, I suspect she has developed this as a tactic to just spend time around him. They kindly indulge her and she will be accompanying us to the opening of the gallery exhibit of Kelly Rathbones show here in Portland, and that has her over the moon excited! I think she has gone through her entire closet 100 times trying to decide what she is going to wear, she has nagged me about getting her hair done and she even wants me to go shopping and buy myself some,"Decent, fancy clothes" because she wants me to look less,"Embarrassing" , so I guess I will be buying some new clothes for the first time in a while.
She has been asking me a LOT of questions lately, questions like,"If I grow up to be..." questions and for the most part they have been okay, but after the boys left the other night she was sitting on the couch next to me and she looked at me and said,"If I grow up to be a lesbian, will you still love me?"
I didn't even pause, I reached over and grabbed her into a hug, and said back to her,"I will love you no matter who you love, as long as you are happy it makes me happy and that's fine with me." I asked her why she felt she had to ask that when she knew my closest friends were a couple of gay men and I am very actively involved in gay rights, and she said,"Well, some people freak out when its their own kid, iv'e seen that on tv, and I worried, what if Cole or Chance is gay?" I looked at her and said,"Aren't you worried about Conner too?" She scrunched up her face and said," Eww, NO! Hes always talking about girls and stuff, so its pretty clear hes not into boys, but Chance is soo prissy at times and Cole is just weird and he doesn't talk about girls at all yet, so I wondered?" Again I said to her, "Love is love is love and as long as its between two consenting adults, its none of my business and I support peoples rights to be happy and love who they want to love. If you are fortunate enough to find someone to love who loves you equally as much, I will support you and love them too and that goes for everyone."
She has asked me a lot of questions lately that haven't been as easy to answer and they have even provoked some arguments with her brother, mostly about schooling and career choices,(things I am much less liberal about), and since her brother just dropped out of high school to attend a training program for computer programming, I am already stressed out about the rest of my kids and the example set.
She has asked me,"Would you love me if I didn't go to college?" The answer was of course, Yes, but then it was followed up with questions of why wouldn't she go to college? (Art school which I explained is actually college), or going into acting which Ill admit I did go a little ballistic over. I don't want her getting into that mess. Its fun and cute for her to do her little entertaining videos while she is a child, but, its a sure path to destruction. I've just seen too much ugliness and destruction and pain come of it and I don't want her to see it as a viable choice. I surround her with people who do not drink or smoke or do drugs and we live healthy and responsible lifestyles and I hope by showing her that, she will find a path that will lead her to law school or medicine or even the sciences, but she argued with me pretty hard saying that she knows drinking and all that other stuff is bad and shes smart enough to avoid it but that she wants to do something,"Fun" for her career, she then followed up with the question, "What if I grew up to be a stripper, would you hate me then?" My eldest son about choked to death on his tea as I froze  and just looked at her, my beautiful, blonde haired, blue eyed, dimpled and angry at me for the moment , brilliant yet angry little girl and I said to her,"No, I would not hate you, that is because I would have failed you . I would hate ME. I would have gone so wrong as a mother and a role model that I hadn't given you any other tools to make it in this world, so I would hate ME for failing you, and it would probably break my heart enough to kill me."
She immediately lost the angry cast to her expression and ran over and hugged me. Yes, dirty pool going with the guilt, but any port in a storm will do.
Shes asked other questions, like "Who is the boy and who is the girl?" in regards to my friends,(thank GOD not to them when they where here), and I told her that it wasn't polite to ask and it was none of our business. "If so and so is gay and if they are, why don't they just say it?"  That one I told her is also none of her business and then we talked about bullying and how the world at large can be cruel and careers can be affected by such things though the world is changing and getting better and hopefully someday it wont even be an issue that people notice or discuss. She has asked about things like child support and poverty and why some fathers don't support their kids when others move heaven and hell to do the right thing,(my bosses husband is a great example of a man who works himself almost to death to support his kids), how insurance works, why people get piercings, gauges, tattoos and implants. When she can get a tattoo, a piercing,(she finds gauges to be gross), or when she will need a bra.
Im kept on my toes trying to keep up with her, and I want to make sure she gets the right information, but there are days when I am left wondering if having a gifted kid is a blessing or a curse?

Dear Roger: Thats Soo Gay!

My life has become fun. Yes, my job is often frustrating and lacking in intellectual challenges and I often loathe dealing the the corporate denizens,but I adore my direct boss and the day to day duties of my job are not too taxing so I am able to perform them without sending myself into paroxysms  of stress and anxiety to the point that I shut myself off from the world too often, (unless corporate involves itself in our doings), so I guess I may be able to keep on keeping on at it for awhile.
I'm not going to get rich at it,(again, corporate will make sure of that), and it often keeps me from getting any writing done, but it makes me get out and at least try to interact with real human beings, and that is a good thing.
I have friends now. I have a few very good friends that I interact with on almost a daily basis in real life. I have friends that come over and hang out with me and talk to me and we laugh and have dinner together and we go out and do things together. I love their company. My kids really like them. I trust them and consider them my erstwhile family. I would defend them and I look forward to seeing them for our weekly dinners. I feel free to be myself with them and completely comfortable around them, as do my kids. We joke and laugh and text back and forth and even talk of attending the Spencer Bell Legacy Concert in Madison Wisconsin in June together.
It shocked me that I invited them to come and to share a suite with me and my other friend, and I meant it. To have finally gained male companions I feel that comfortable with at this point? I feel both at peace and elated. My friends are gay men, and in many ways that doesn't surprise me. I have always been more comfortable around men and gay men in particular. There is no weird sexual tension,(though I find them completely adorable), we joke about sex and cute guys and all sorts of things along those lines, but its not like trying to be friends with a straight man where you worry about that if you have sex you will screw up the friendship.
One of them is just whip smart and a grammar fanatic, he keeps me on my toes with my texts and we joke back and forth constantly about my faux pauxs in my typing and such and I enjoy it, I think in many ways he reminds me of you and that is what I enjoy about him so damn much. We are going to an art exhibit opening the beginning of the month together and I think that I am looking forward to that more that I would be looking forward to an actual date! We have gone to a burlesque show, out to dinner, and have plans for other outings. I babysit their dogs when they are at work, and its often crazy around my house during the day because of it, but its been a wonderful kind of crazy for me.
I'm not 100% by a long shot, I still have my bad days where I just have to lurk in my house and debate my place in the world and why I am still here, but its gotten brighter and funnier and I am making progress and friends, so maybe there is hope that someday I will at least reach halfway.

My dog Benny is  finally helping to heal the pain of losing Fergus, I can look at his pictures now without sobbing like my heart is broken all over again. Benny sleeps against my chest every night and is a terrible snorer and blanket hog and I often wake up with him sprawled across my throat which is a bit alarming, but he greets me with love and enthusiasm every morning, and every afternoon when I return from work, and he is currently ensconced in my lap as if its his personal throne. My only complaint with him is that I an not allowed any alone time! If I even attempt to shut him out of the bathroom, he sits at the door and barks non-stop or scratches at it until daughter gets annoyed and lets him in. I do not appreciate his company in the shower, but the alternative is annoying to the rest of the family. I guess I will learn to deal.

Dear Roger:You Are Who You Are

Since I first showed an interest in entering the realm of public service my psyche and personality has been analyzed and picked apart by every type of test and screening tool that shrinks and hacks could throw out there for the government to spend our tax dollars on. I've taken the MMPI, the Meyers Briggs, I've had to suffer through my,"Colors" being analyzed while people tried to decide if I was a team player enough for Americorp,(I got into Americorp and served but am most decidedly NOT a team player), I am very much a control freak who did quite well teaching Smoking Cessation classes to undeserved communities, because I was running the show and helping people.
The one test that I have taken over and over again since my very first class that was moshed up blend of Sociology/Psychology and English and Ethics was a personality type indicator test that assigns letters to you and its haunted me my whole damn life because though I have taken it over and over again at different points in my life, after different things have hit me, molded me, changed me and you would think made me a vastly different person, I always get the same damn response...those same damn letters that mark me as someone who no matter how I rail against it and want to be a colder and harder person who doesn't give a damn, just cannot.
ISFJ-Introverted Sensing Feeling Judging,  my son read the description of the type and he looked up at me and said,"Whoa...its like they just wrote a perfect description of you, except you aren't an introvert, you like a few people you just like them on your terms and on a very limited basis."
Loyal to a fault, those who have followed along with my life for the past couple of years know this is true about me. I am one of the dogged few still supporting the same things and people I have supported all along, quietly but with the same devotion and passion. Doing what I can when I can and just keeping on keeping on.
I work a job I am vastly over-qualified for, not because I have to, but because of the simple reason I adore my boss. She is the mom figure I needed. She has been my mentor, my friend and the best PTSD and grief counselor I have ever had. She calls me on my bull shit, has made me try to live in the world again, and she has helped me to find a focus. When she leaves, I will leave too unless she asks me to stay as a favor to her. Other jobs I have held have been the same way, I held them because I liked the people I worked with. If I don't like the person or company I work for, then I wont do it. I cant be bought and I've always managed to find places to be where people are somewhat enjoyable to be around. I loved my tenure at the Sheriffs department and I worked for free for a long time. There were people there I would have stepped in front of a bullet for. People like that are few and far between in my life, I've met one in the past 3 years outside of my kids that I felt I would protect like that, its a weird feeling, that call to duty and I don't know what In my genetic code cursed me with it, but It seems to run in my family.
My grandpa im pretty sure was cut the same and I'm getting the same feeling off my daughter. Shes oddly devoted, very focused and caring, and shes a hard worker that doesn't mind giving up the glory to make others feel good and she will fight tooth and nail to protect her loved ones. She approached her principal on her own today about having an assembly so she could give a speech about how bullying could really harm someone and how words are hurtful to people you might not even suspect can be hurt by them. I was shocked that she did that, but she is adamant she wants to do it, she feels called to stop people from suffering. Oh, my poor baby! She is starting down a hard road and I don't know what to do for her other than support her. I can remember being her age and standing in front of a classroom full of kids giving a tear soaked speech about how cruel and evil it was for the boys to have stomped and killed a nest full of Kildeer chicks out on the 2nd grade play ground at recess. I remember the giggles of the boys in the class and the look from the teacher, who allowed me to speak, but then sent me to the nurse to lay down because I was so overwrought. My daughter I could see wanting to kick the asses of those boys...shes the slightly tougher and meaner version of me, but then again she has 3 older brothers.
She has been bullied for her quirkiness, and its had an impact on her. Jackson no longer goes with her to school and she may still dress every bit as funky as she ever did, but she does not wear dresses to school anymore. She isnt as outgoing as she once was and that saddens me, because I do not want to see her become like me. I want her to be an extrovert and less of a giver, more of a taker in the world. Maybe that is wrong but as I sit here tonight, still fuming with anger somewhat over a snide comment that my ex made that I,"Overspend each month." Yeah...overspend the money I earn and use to support my kids on my own. I wish I had been more inclined to take and less inclined to forgive and put up with bullshit. I want her to be the type of woman that will take power and set the world on its ear, make it take notice and hear her roar, even if I am still sitting in the shadows quietly cheering her on.

Dear Roger: Work It Boy! Girl! Uh?! Its Burlesque, Who The Hell Knows?

I went out Thursday night with my boys. Yes, let that little bit of news sink in, I WENT OUT! I was sitting on my couch in the early evening with Benny sprawled across my track pants clad lap,scrolling through Tumblr, texting back and forth with one of my guys about the hissy fit my eldest son was throwing about something that I had done that had made him mad, and my friend who is gay was making me laugh by speculating that my sons behavior was very gay in itself. All in all, a typical evening faced me. After a bit he reached his home and the texting stopped so I went about my business of talking to friends on twitter and refereeing fights among the kids when suddenly my phone sounded with the song,"Secrets" which is my guys ringtone. I was surprised but figured they needed something for their apartment or had some question, but it was the one I had been texting with and he said,"How soon can you be ready to go? Would you like to go to an all male Burlesque show in downtown Portland?" I was stunned almost into silence and then he said,"Dress flashy maybe you'll get laid!" I was dressed and out the door in less than 10 minutes.
It was AWESOME! A grown up night out with a couple of guys I trust and enjoy the company of, and the show was really cool. It wasn't just full on strippers, (though there was plenty of that), there were a couple of really talented singers, a couple of gymnasts that were amazing to watch, and some really great dancers, but the act that stole the show for me were Isiah and Ezekiel. They are a team of an over 6'4 black man and a maybe 5'2 Asian man who dance together and strip and its the hottest thing I have seen in well...wow.
The guys and I sat at a table in the very front and we were surrounded by friends of the burlesque troupe so that made for a very interesting night as they all seemed to be well oiled and indulging in all kinds of substances and each other as the night went on, but it just added to the ambiance of the night. It was a scene that would have blown my very conservative sons mind but I loved it! I tipped and tipped well, made no bones about the fact I was damn sure looking and enjoying things.
We had a great time, laughed a lot, talked about all kinds of things that would have shocked people who think they know me, and I am really looking forward to going again. Our collected New Years resolution was to get out and start living more and this was just the start of it, and while it was a wild start, it was an awesome start! I got flirted with as we were getting ready to leave, and while I appreciated the attention that at least let me know I sort of hit the,"Flashy" mark, im still not into younger women.