Not your normal mom…

I’ve said it, time and time again. I’m not the normal mom, not the mom we grew up watching on tv, what with the fresh baked cookies, immaculately clean house, the calm cool composure, the happy smile despite what trouble the little ones have gotten into now. I’m not one to smile and simper and pat little Johnny on the head when he comes home with perfect A’s, and squeeze little Susie in perfectly controlled hug, while remaining unwrinkled in my dress and heels with every hair in place and nary a chipped nail to be seen.

I am not that mom.

What I am, and what I put forth and show the world, is the truth about my motherhood. Sometimes? Our kids drive us insane. Sometimes, we wonder if we really SHOULD have put them in Layaway and come back to pick them up when they were 18 and able to live on their own. Sometimes, I’m a royal class bitch – to everyone, and to my kids. Sometimes, my kids are royal class assholes right back at me. Sometimes I want to scream. Sometimes I want to cry. But always, under it all, I love my kids, and my kids have never, ever, EVER doubted that. Not for a single second. Not even when they’re screaming they hate me, not when I’m pretty sure the feeling – for that one moment in time – is mutual.

The biggest difference I think, is that I’m honest about it. I don’t paint a life of roses, because there is no such thing. No one is perfect (though I’m pretty close! Ha!) and we all have those moments where we just HAVE to explode and wonder why oh why we took on this hardest of jobs – not just once, in my case, but THREE TIMES, plus all the other teenagers that call my house home. I don’t paint that perfect smile on my blogs, either, because life isn’t perfect. My kids aren’t perfect, any more then yours are, despite how you portray them to the world.

I like to keep it real.

The Mommywars have gone on since way before the internets. There are always those folks who judge you for a brief second, a snap judgment for something they heard, thought they heard, or picked up from Susie’s mom’s trainer’s daughter’s pimp’s neighbor’s son’s dog. Then they rarely say something to you, instead they continue to spread what they’ve heard/imagined, and it grows in magnitude until you sit there wondering just how it all started, and why on earth did that first person not take the time to actually ASK for clarification from the source.

You see, I get that people don’t always get me. My sense of humor is crass, dirty, and often dark. I find laughter in things that most folks only find horror and tears, because to me – if I can laugh about it, it loses some of it’s power over me. The way to overcome an obstacle is to find the humor in it – even if it’s of a dark vein, even if it’s scary and twisted and no one else gets it. I find a handhold in laughing about it. A lot of other mothers do the same, and sometimes, the misunderstandings of other “perfect” moms means situations go completely downhill, all to fast.

Yes, I’m talking about the twitter incident. I understand the concern that was brought up by the twitter in question, but at the same time, I wonder at the inability to read something in context, and the quickness of other mother’s to judge. Whether we paint a perfect picture over it or not, there is not one single mother out there who can say they’ve NEVER been so frustrated with their kids that they’ve wanted to sell them to the Gypsies. There is not one single parent out there that hasn’t pulled their hair out, screamed into a pillow, or made some snark comment about doing something, ANYTHING to just get this kid to SLEEP already because OMG I’M DYING HERE. Swear all you like, but not a single one of you has managed to raise your kids without wishing, at some point, that they’d just GO AWAY and LEAVE YOU ALONE for just FIVE MINUTES.

The reasoning behind what the whistle blower did might have truly included acting out of concern for a child, but the line there gets fuzzy, as she went to the authorities first. In my state, that would have had child protective services in the home, and the children likely taken away – all because one mother voiced her frustration. We’ve given the whistle blowers so much power that the slightest infraction results in massive consequences that are almost impossible to dig yourself out from under. And all because a mother can’t admit to herself that her sweet little babies sometimes drive her to think not so nice things, and she doesn’t have the courage to admit it to herself, to others, because her version of painted perfection can. not. crack.

Those are the mother’s I worry about – the ones that can’t admit that the way her teenager talks sometimes makes her want to stab herself in the temple, that the refusal of a child to sleep, EVER, has driven her to contemplate pretending the child has a cold so that medicine is in order, just to slow them down for five. minutes. PLEASE. That mother can’t admit to herself, let alone out loud, that she dreams of a hotel room without children present, where she can do nothing but sleep for a full 24 hours, followed by room service and a massage, instead of nights upon nights of very little sleep, followed by being a short order cook reduced to making sure foods are touching on the plate and counting how many times the little darlings have yelled about the other is LOOKING at him OMG MAKE HIM STOP LOOKING AT ME, MOM!

These are the mothers that are delusional. These are the mothers that will later crack. These are the mothers that can’t face the reality that parenting is HARD, and their kids are not perfect, and no amount of wishing or white-washing will make them so. And these are the parents that stand there, in their carefully constructed cocoon of perfection, making snap judgments toward those of us digging in our heels, hovering in the trenches, patting the helmets of the mother next to us in shared understanding, honestly and commitment.

It is not our job to judge one another – it is not our job to decide what you do is wrong, what she does is right. The internet parenting blog is a place of snapshots, a glimpse into the life of the writer, whether we be painting perfection, or baring the gritty underbelly of honesty.

So all I’m suggesting here is this: don’t judge a mom by her writing. If one mom thinks her son is acting kind of like an asshole – don’t come down on her because you know, if you were sitting next to that kid at that restaurant, you probably thought he was acting kinda like an asshole too, but since it wasn’t YOUR kid, it somehow made it OK to think that, but not his mother, because she must be perfect. Don’t assume that another mother is serious when she twitters her frustration in a way that you don’t get, or understand, all because you’ve judged her capable of actually doing her children harm in 40 characters or less. Take the time to know the mother, to read it in context, to see if that sense of humor is dark and twisted and there, to discover if there really is a threat before you hit that button, before you call the cops, before you make her life just THAT much more difficult so that you can continue to reign alone on your pedestal of perfect parenthood.

Face it. Parenting is HARD. It is not all roses, no matter how many choose to carefully craft illusions. Joking about it gives a release that makes it bearable, even if you don’t understand the humor involved. For me, snarking on the teenagers allows me to ensure we survive to see them have their own kids and discover the same frustrations I’ve lived through once already.

That is, after all, my reward for letting them live.

Living in Alaska.

…yes. Alaska. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it here or there, that yes, I live in the coldest state in the nation, especially during the past two weeks. In fact, a friend on the East coast told me that their weatherman said that they had no cause to bitch about the cold, as they didn’t live here in the past couple weeks. Make no mistake, ya’ll – when we say it was cold? It was FRIGID COLD. We’ve spent the past 2 weeks huddling together next to heaters and under blankets as the temperatures in our area hovered between -25F and -34F.

Yes. Thirty-four degrees below zero. As in REALLY FREAKING COLD.

Then, at about 2 am yesterday morning, I was just heading to bed and I heard a loud SNAP in the garage, and shortly thereafter realized that I hadn’t heard the heaters click on for a long time. Too long. And it was getting colder in the house. So I went out to check the furnace, and sure enough, there was pressure billowing out of the release valve, and absolutely no hot water going through the pipes, which means… you guessed it. Zero Heat.

So, I did what every good mama does. I went out to the boy’s room to be sure he had heat – which he did. His little furnace is a separate unit. I warned him I might have to send the girls out, then made sure they were asleep. Then I checked the time, and opted to try and wait it out until Papa and Nana were closer to their normal wake up time. When the Pup started to look chilly, I gathered her and every blanket in sight (cept the one I was using, of course!) and got her to the couch, bundled and warm where she went back to sleep. Then I told The Girl – who would like to be called “Peppermist” from now on, and no, I don’t know why – to go to the manspace/boy’s room.

She, in her typical Teenager Fashion, ignored me.
Three times.
Inorite?!

So I let her suffer. I figured if she got cold enough she’d get up and move. HA! Never underestimate the powers of a sleeping teenager! She did NOT move, but insisted she wasn’t THAT cold. Whatever. Maybe it was the name change that made her more stubborn?!

So anyway, I bundled up in my blankets, and messed around online, discovering how to type with gloves on, and watched the clock until I knew Papa and Nana wouldn’t grump about being woken up too early. I called at 5:45am, and sent the girls down to nap on their couch and get good and warm before they went to school, then got the boy off, all while calling the emergency numbers for heating and plumbing places that had a – turned off their emergency lines or 2 – didn’t put a time they’d open on their answering machines.

*mutter*

So I got the name of an all around handiman kinda guy (though he didn’t do cars, darnitall, as my car has no heat either!) and he answered right away. He was at my house by 8:45am, bout which time it was down to a bracing 42 degrees INSIDE my house. Yes, that mummy of comforters muttering cursewords you heard about was indeed me.

Three hours into it, discovering there was 1 – a leak and 2 – it was low on water and 3- every pipe along the garage wall had frozen, he was just on his way inside to tell me he couldn’t do anything about it and he was at a loss, when it FINALLY broke through! He told me “You are the luckiest woman on the face of the earth!” to which I replied “inorite?!” So we finally have heat, and it’s above 60 in my house again, and a virtual heat wave outside at just -2F. He’ll be back next week to finish the repairs, which will cost me another $500 or so, but it’s a small price to pay to be warm.

So why do I live here again?! I cling to the idea that it is a great place to raise kids… though this week? My hold may be slipping…