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.