In the Gutter

I want to say last week was an easy one. But that would be lying. And since I still have memories of standing in the corner with my nose pressed against the wall while trying to figure out just how my mom knew it was me who drank the peach schnapps and tried to replace it with water ate the last cookie instead of my brother, I figure I'll just tell the truth.

I talked a good game about keeping up beat and smiling through the tears. Heck, I was determined to remember the joy of my friend's life and not dwell on the fact I will no longer be able to stoop over and give her a big hug or tease her about the hats she liked to wear.

But standing at the cemetery, just a few rows from where I once stood and watched my son lowered into the ground was almost more than I could bear. All I could think about was the memory of what holding your dead child in your arms feels like.

After the service I wandered over to Bug's grave with my husband holding my hand. I felt like a fraud who was wiped out with grief. I needed a moment to tell Bug I love him and how his parents and siblings miss him so. That he is never forgotten.

After bending down to wipe some dust from his name carved in the rock, I looked up from his marker. I was startled to meet the eyes of Boo's family and our friends staring down at me. Sadness and pity and love all emanated from them.

I wasn't ready for the onslaught of people who had trudged over to pay respects to my son. To Boo and I.

I was a wreck. So much for my tough talk. I felt like a fraud, pretending to be well adjusted when really I am just a broken hearted mother who hasn't quite figured out how to chase the pain away. I wanted to scream at them to turn away. To give me a minute to touch his marker and pretend it was my son's lily white skin I was caressing. I wanted to shake them all and tell them to cherish the ones they love so dearly because you never know when your tomorrows will come to an end.

Hell, I wanted to rip off my clothes and run screaming, stark raving mad as far as my feet could take me until all my pain finally disappeared.

I was completely unprepared to share my son, or the memory of him with anyone. Not even my husband.

It was a grim reminder of a day I never wanted to live, never wanted to repeat.

I pushed away and escaped the throng of well meaning family members to go sit in my car. I cried. The gasping, snotty ugly cry. Behind my puffy red eyes, my mind was wishing to have Loreen and Shalebug back for one moment to make sure they knew how much we, I, loved them.

One moment would never be enough though. Not when you love someone and lose them.

So I did what any grieving mother and friend would do.

I cowboyed up. I took a deep breath, and slapped on my sunglasses. Red puffy eyes ringed with smeared mascara is not a cute look on me.

I harnessed the love around me and decided to turn the tables on grief. Enough with the weeping. It was making me feel old. And it is starting to give me wrinkles.

Well, okay. My kids are giving me wrinkles, but I was running out of tissues and I refused to wipe my snotty nose on my sleeve. I am a classy gal , after all.

The question is, what does one do to celebrate the lives of a beloved friend/aunt/mother (and a little boy) who loved life so?

Well, if you're a redneck like me, that means bowling and beer.

What better way to show your love for lost loved ones than slipping on a pair of diseased and dirty bowling shoes that who knows how many others before you stuffed their sweaty fungally feet in?





Oh ya. I'm the bowling Queen.

Boo and I gathered up the masses, comprised of cousins he hasn't seen since before he sprouted hair around his Mr.Pickle and a few close friends and we headed to the bowling alley.

This was the first time I had met this side of Boo's family, as they all live out of province. Great. I'm grieving, I suck at bowling and I blog about my vagina. You just know I'm bound to make a good impression on his family. Heh.

Thankfully, Boo's family are the polar opposite to who I am. A judgmental, emotionally unstable smart ass. So I had that working in my favour.

However, did I mention Boo's family are all professional bowlers of some sort? No? Probably because I didn't know that myself until after the teams were made up and I watched them bowl strike after strike after strike.





This is me, barely able to keep from dropping the ball. Ya. I'm SMOOTH.

Great. Now I'm not only worried about keeping my bowling shoes out of my mouth but my ball (and my mind) out of the gutter. Thankfully, Sleeman's Honey Brown helped calm me down and channel my inner bowling freak.

Well, inner freak.

After the first game where I bowled an astonishing 44 point game and my children threatened to trade me in for the homeless woman we had passed on the street (because you know...surely she could bowl better than me) I loosened up. Nothing like making an arse out of oneself with masses of family members watching you and snickering behind your back. Literally.





At one point, a wise guy family member brought me the handicapped help thingy. You know. So I could have a chance at hitting ONE pin.

I was on my best behaviour. I smiled. I joked. I hid my bad bowling temper tantrums behind the soda machines. I was determined to make a good impression.

I knew I was doomed when my darlin' husband started handing out my business cards like condoms at the high school prom.

Oh well, love me, love thy blog I thought as I watched my ball slowly curve toward the gutter.

(Have you ever noticed when some people play video games they wave the controllers around wildly, as though they can magically command the game to go in the direction of their arms but ultimately just look like a kid having an epileptic fit? Ya, that was me as the ball headed toward the gutter. I was standing on one foot, madly waving the ball away from the gutter in hopes that my mind could control the curve of ball. Because I'm so good at mind control, you know.)





Note the wild look in my eye. Beer does funny things to me. As does bowling.

Of course, a night out with me wouldn't be any fun unless my husband had an opportunity to yank my foot out of my mouth at least once. We both knew it was going to happen. It was just a question of when.

In my defense, it was the beer. Really. One of his very nice cousins complimented me on my tattoos. We bonded over our ink. Finally, here is a family member I could be myself with, I thought, in my beer addled brain.

(You know when you are talking to someone and it's going really well and you get excited and in your excitement you say something that crosses the line and then the person you are trying to bond with gets a funny look on their face and wonders what the hell you are smoking, then takes a deep swig of their drink while looking for the nearest escape route?

Ya. Well, I am Queen at engineering those moments.)

His charming and tattooed cousin inquired if I had planned to get any more ink. "Absolutely," I responded enthusiastically (and probably slightly slurred), "but only when I know Boo's going to be out of town for a while. He doesn't approve of me desecrating my skin."

"What? Boo doesn't like your tats? Has he no taste? Boo! What the hell is wrong with you," he called out to my husband. Boo walked over and tried to give me the "Please put your beer down and close your mouth before you say something that will embarrass both of us" look.

However, my beer goggles interpreted said look as "Please continue. I'm dying to hear how your bowling shoes taste after I have to yank them out of the mouth you refuse to shut."

Before Boo could explain he didn't particularly like tattoos but he respected my right to plaster them all over my body, I answered for him. (Because good wives do that.)

"Well, he may not like the tatties but he sure loves my nipple rings," I half shouted, half laughed while gesturing to my twins.

It was at that moment the stars aligned themselves and there happened to be a quiet moment in the busy bowling alley where no pins were being struck down. (What's the facking chances of that, eh?) The entire building (hell, the city) heard me tell the world my husband likes to play with my hoops.

While his very conservative Christian family tried to pretend they weren't staring at my chest imagining my sparkly boobs.

I beat a hasty retreat like the coward I am to 'go to the washroom' and left my husband to explain about how his wife shouldn't be allowed out in public to his cousin.

But by the end of the night, I was no longer sad. (Or self conscious thanks to my Sleeman's.) I was able to remember my son and Boo's aunt, my friend, without succumbing to the tidal waves of grief that had threatened to drown me earlier.

I was able to laugh and smile. Which honors them more than any snot encrusted kleenex ever could.

Beer and balls. It does a body good.

Hall of Fame Hair

The other day as I was getting my jacket on and getting ready to leave, my daughter came around the corner and asked me where I was going.

"I'm leaving to get my hair done," I answered as I bent over to slip on my shoes.

"Oh no!" She moaned.

"What do you mean, oh no?" I asked. I mean, there was no question about it; I was starting to resemble Medusa so I figured a haircut was a good thing.

"Frac! Mom's getting her hair done!" she called to her brother. Then Frac came racing into the room and skidded to a stop on his dirty socks.

"You're not going to do anything funny with it, are you?" he asked suspiciously.

I looked at my ego bruising spawn and then looked in the mirror by the door. I didn't look like a freak. Why were they suddenly acting like I just morphed into one? "Um, no. I was thinking of just getting a trim. But now that you think of it, maybe I'll shave it off."

"As if," Fric said as she rolled her eyes at me. (Sometimes I just want to take those pretty blue eyes and staple them into one place so she can't do the whole eye rolling snotty preteen routine with me.)

Instead I just asked her to define a funny hair cut.

Before I barely finished my sentence, Frac chimed in with "Any of the weird hairdo's you used to have before you decided to start growing out your hair. You're so pretty now." Clever boy, trying to sway me with compliments.

I patted my little minions on the head and hopped in the car to leave them wondering if I was going to pull a Dennis Rodman and come home with multicolour hair and MOM shaved into the side of my skull.

As I drove into the city I started thinking about my hairstyles of the past. Surely they weren't all bad, I thought to myself. When I got to the salon, my stylist, the incredible, amazing and most beautiful Carolyn asked if we were going to try something different.

"I think you'd look really great with that new bob Posh Spice is sporting," she said as she played with my hair.

I was tempted to try it, but my children's faces and their looks of horror flashed before my eyes. "No, let's just stick with a trim," I sighed. So boring.

When I came home my children peeked behind their hands that were plastered over their eyes and sighed audibly with relief when they saw I didn't do anything drastically different to my hair. "Nice 'do," they called as they resumed whatever game my entrance had interupted.

Still, I couldn't stop thinking about my hair choices in the past. I decided to crack open the photo albums and walk through time. Nothing like a little photographic evidence to prove my children wrong. That I am indeed, a high fashion guru, whose style choices are always bang on.

Snicker.

It started well enough. I was a cute kid, if I say so myself.

 
 

 

Of course, my mom was in charge of my hair style back then. 

Then I moved onto grade school pictures and remembered the time in grade five when my best friend Jen, cut off all her beautiful hair. I had to have the same cut. My mom pleaded with me to change my mind but I was adamant. I wanted a boy's cut.

 
 

 

My tenth birthday. I look like my son. 

So I may have made one bad choice. Big deal. I was ten. In the eyes of the law, I can't be held accountable for my actions.

Fast forward several years (it took that long to grow out) and I was 16, almost 17. It was a lovely day out on the Pacific ocean, just off Vancouver Island. Not bad. Not great, but not bad.

 
 

 

I pined for Boo the entire trip, only to break up with him a week after I got home. I blame my hair for my idiocy. 

Then I found this. Ouch. I was twenty. And decided I no longer liked being blonde. So I switched to strawberry blonde.

 
 

 

Reason #564 why my brother-in-law is not allowed to have a camera near me.

 

Which led me to this photo. It was Fric's first Christmas. Try and ignore my lovely 'do, and focus on the cute bald baby.

 
 

 

To think I conceived Frac with hair like that. My husband must have been blind.

 

Shortly after Frac was born, I decided hair maintenance was too much work with a thirteen month old and a newborn. So I made the decision to hack it all off, just days after giving birth.

 
 

 

>This is why you never hack off your hair when your hormones are in flux. You could look like me. 

I actually didn't mind the short hair, but my husband hated crawling into bed with a carrot-topped boy who sprayed milk from her boobs. He found it disconcerting. So I promised to try and grow it out.

 
 

 

That's when I discovered wings really can't help you fly. 

Turns out the length wasn't really the problem, but the colour. Boo wanted my blonde back. So I hacked it all off to try and get the orange out and start growing it from scratch.

I'll do anything to please my man. Heh heh.

 
 

 

I was going for a sexy brillo pad look. 

But I was easily bored and schizophrenic. When it finally got long, I quickly tired of the bland blonde and decided to switch things up by going dark.

 
 

 

Bug wouldn't come near me for weeks. Either would Boo. 

The brown wasn't rocking me. Turns out this gal has more fun blonde than brunette. But I was feeling bogged down by motherhood and heck, I was still young. I decided to try something more spastic trendy.

 
 

 

This is what my best friend calls my Oreo Cookie days. She's supportive like that. She had to hug me to keep from crying. 

Alright. That was definitely a bad choice. Compounded a few weeks later when my mother went out and got the exact same cut and colour. We were two Oreo's from the same package.

My husband threatened divorce if I didn't fix my hair so I hacked it all off and went back to blonde.

 
 

 

He was much happier with me. 

My hair was threatening to mutiny so I decided to let it be for a bit.

But then I got restless. Nothing like changing your hair to make you feel like a new woman.

 
 

 

I can't decide what's worse, the hair, the colour or my double chin. 

It was shortly after this photo was taken that my son died. I remember coming home from his funeral and looking into the mirror and not recognizing myself. I looked so empty. So sad.

I decided right then that I would never dye my hair another hideous colour again. I know it's ridiculous to correlate hair colour with death, but I'll never be able to be dark haired again with out being reminded of the worst time of my life.

So I stripped it and went back to my normal colour.

 
 

 

Much better. Even if I'm not sitting up straight and every guy in the room can see down my shirt. Heh. 

As I gathered up all the photo albums and put them back on the shelf, I realized my kids were right. I have made some facked up funny hair choices.

(Literally. The kids won't stop laughing as they look at these pictures. Ingrates.)

No wonder my husband lives in fear every time I tell him I am going to get my hair done.

Heh. That's half the fun of being a girl.

It's my hair and I'll do what I want to. And right now, I want to look, er, normal.

Meatloaf...The Answer to A Parent's Prayers

As every day passes it is becoming more and more obvious that I am completely unprepared for the teenage trials and tribulations that lay before us.

My son recently sprouted two hollow legs, hoovering food and anything else not nailed down and all of his pants are starting to look like capris with inches of ankle bone showing. He sprang up over night. I am dreading the day I wake up to find all my hand lotion missing and a bunch of dirty socks stuffed under his bed.

My daughter has become obsessed with growing breasts, wearing makeup and styling her hair. She spends hours staring into the mirror trying to visualize what she will look like as a grown up and pondering her future as a famous singer/world class surgeon/supermodel all at once.

I'm still stuck in the lego and Barbie stage; offering them juice boxes and asking them if they want chicken fingers or mac n' cheese for supper.

They are growing up faster than I am maturing as a parent and it's starting to scare the hell out of me.

It doesn't help they attend a school where grades five through 12 freely roam the halls. The almost adult kids try to avoid the wee ones like my Fric and Frac but inevitably, due to lack of square footage, their paths collide.

Fric and Frac learn all sorts of interesting life lessons while on the playgrounds of public school. And they are more than eager to share those lessons with their totally hip, rad wrinkled, worried mother.

Any day my pubic hair are going to start turning gray, people.

The other day Fric and Frac came home talking about boners and stiffies and they wanted to know what 'wanking off' meant. They haven't really figured out what masturbation means and I'd like to keep it that way for a while.

Just to keep my sanity for a few more days.

But they persisted and kept gnawing at my ankles like rabid little rats and wanted to know why some of the boys on the bus were telling a kid to buy a melon, microwave it for a few seconds to warm up the middle and then cut a hole in it.

Was it some fancy new type of dessert? Have we been eating melon the wrong way for all of these years? Were they missing out on some magic formula to magically morph them into one of the cool kids?

And by the way, Mom, why does everyone keep teasing the boys about warm apple pie? What's the joke?

I had several choices at this moment as I stopped, picked up my jaw and pushed my exploded eyeballs back into my head while inwardly cursing the fact that we live out in the sticks and my children are forced to ride the little yellow bus with a bunch of sex starved adolescent boys.

(Shit like this never happened when I lived in the city and had to walk to school. No sirree. It was all fairy princesses and sparkle dust. Heh.)

I could sit down and calmly and rationally explain the jokes and have an age appropriate conversation about sex or I could bury my head in the sand and let Satan's spawn on the school bus corrupt my beautiful innocent children forever.

Hell no. If any one gets to corrupt my children it's gonna be me. I didn't spend eight hours in hard labour trying to push their fat heads out of my itty bitty pink parts just to allow someone else have all the fun. I've earned the right to be able to twist their little minds every darn time I had to wipe their poopy bums or kiss their booboos.

Still, this wasn't a conversation to enter in to lightly so I did what any quick thinking momma would do. I told them to do their home work and we would talk about this after supper.

I needed time to collect my thoughts and figure out how not to scar myself for years to come to delicately word our conversation.

That and I wanted to call Boo. See if he had time to deal with it. Maybe we could conference call it, and he could do all the heavy lifting. (I'm thoughtful like that.) But Boo was actually working so I would have to face the firing squad alone without any back up.

I felt like an old gun slinger heading out to main street at the stroke of noon, aware that if I wasn't the fastest draw I'd end up with a bullet in the head.

After supper my delightfully excited demon spawn sat down with me and we talked. About everything. Kinda. I still edited as much as I could. Had to save some of the good stuff for their dad. Heh. But in the end, Frac ran screeching from the room with his ears bleeding and my daughter just sat on the couch with a stunned look on her face, wishing she had never asked.

Mission accomplished.

Heh.

Later that night, Boo phoned and asked how our day went. When I told him his children wanted to know why boys spunk into fruit I heard the phone clatter to the floor and my husband having a small heart attack on the other end. When he sufficiently recovered he asked how I handled the situation.

"Why? Don't you trust me? You think I will warp them don't you?" I asked on the defensive.

"No, no, nothing like that," he rushed to reassure me. "I know you would do the best you could. It's just sometimes your best is a little, um, frank. Plus, this kinda came at me out of the blue," he hurriedly added so I wouldn't rip off his head, shit down his throat and then stuff his skull down the gaping wound that was once his neck.

"Came at YOU out of the blue???" I huffed. "Try being the one to explain what wanking off or tugging the one-eyed snake meant!"

"Well, how did you do it?" I could tell my beloved was wrestling simultaneously with fear and curiosity. While he dreaded my answer he needed to know. Kinda like rubber necking at an accident site. You just can't stop yourself.

"I explained the whole self-gratification thing in a non-specific manner but I felt it was more important to focus on teen age sex. Especially since they are obviously hearing about it every day. I don't want them to think it is cool or an activity to engage in lightly." I took a deep breath before continuing.

"Because if I have grandbabies before I turn forty I'm ripping off your nuts and barbequing them. It will be all your fault for leaving me alone with these kids during their crucial development stage."

"Fair enough," Boo said. "So what did you say?"

"Well, not much to be honest. I sat them down and made them watch a music video and then explained the lyrics. That pretty much did all the work for me. I think we may be raising a future nun and a forty year old virgin. I'm okay with that," I laughed.

"Cool," Boo laughed. "But what video did you make them watch?"

"Oh, just an old Meatloaf video. What's better than a little rock and roll to go with a sex talk?," I giggled as I remembered my children's horror filled faces as I explained to them the realities of teen age sex courtesy of 70's rock.

What better than a video that explains the difference between boys and girls and sex and the harsh realities of what happens when you have sex when you aren't ready.

Plus, I may have had a little fun rocking out to the video and remembering my own steamy teenage nights parked in a vehicle in the middle of no where.

Heh.

Ya. I so rock this parenting gig.


Thank you Meatloaf, for giving me the words I needed to say in a way my kids will remember for the rest of time. I heart you.