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.