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 ....