Long Distance Marriages

It's not a state secret that my husband doesn't live with me most of the time. He works in a far away place and keeps a second residence there. We do a lot of skype chats, make a lot of phone calls and he's been known to pester me with text messages because as he says, he likes having me on a short electronic leash.

My husband, the romantic.

It can be tough not having him home most of the time. I like having him home. I mean, I married the man after all. But he has goals and I have goals and our family has goals and none of these goals can be met with him working close to home due to the industry he joined when he entered the work force.

I don't often write about the struggles of having a husband who is only home for roughly six days a month or a father who misses most of his kid's daily lives because there isn't much more to say other than it truly sucks. Both my husband and I move mountains to make sure he never misses the big events, the birthdays, the holidays, the awards ceremonies and soon to come, the first dates, the proms or the graduation events.

But he isn't here for the quick and dirty of family life. He misses the doctor appointments, the parent teacher conferences. He's not home to help fold laundry or goad the children into picking up their own dirty socks. He can't referee when my teens morph into hormonal ultimate fighting champions intent on tearing one another limb from limb and he certainly has not changed his fair share of Jumby's dirty diapers.

We are keenly aware of just exactly what it is he is missing and how much value to it there really is. When a parent buries a child you can't help but realize it is the little things in that child's life that mean the most. The smallest quietest moments are the ones that mean the most in life. It is those moments that spark us and see us through the burden of daily survival.

Our family does fine with out the big man under our roof. He's trained all of us well in the art of rural survival. We can all thaw a frozen sewer line or clear four feet of freshly fallen snow with our ATV and snow blade. Granted none of us have mastered the art of grilling a steak the way he does but then again, no one pours the milk into a bowl of dry cereal with quite as much flare as I can, so it all balances out.

When Boo does make it home we tend to cocoon around him and soak up his energy for the small time he has home. In other words, I am off duty. All parental obligations other than cuddle time falls to my husband. Mostly because my children abandon me for their father. Because they are ingrates. And they forget who feeds them 99 percent of the time.

It took us a while to find our groove in his absence but somehow we manage to make it all work. Some days are easier than others and some days I am thundering on the phone that he needs to GET HOME NOW BEFORE I LOSE MY MIND. Our situation isn't ideal, nor would I recommend it for any family but it is what it is.

I'm just thankful I only have to shave my legs once a month. There is a bright side to everything.

While my husband is away, earning the money to pay for my internet connection and to keep a roof over all of our heads, he likes to read my blog. He says he likes reading it because it allows him into a part of me that I don't always share on the phone and it helps him keep a bead on my current level of crazy.

Last night he called and lodged a complaint.

"You haven't blogged in a week."

"I know. I know. I've been so busy and now I'm sick and I've got nothing of interest to say so I'm just biding my time till my creativity kicks back in."

"It must be nice to only work when you feel like it."

"Excuse me? I work every single day. These kids don't parent themselves you know. And I'm dying of the plague and no one here feels sorry for me. My life dude, it is hard."

"You're pathetic."

"Yes, but I'm cute. So it balances out in the end, right?"

My life isn't hard. My husband's life on the other hand seems unbearably cruel to me. He's separated from the people he most loves in this world so that he can provide for us, for our family and our collective futures. He works unending hours, surrounded by other people who are in the same situations, all of them trying to cobble some sense of family together while separated from their loved ones.

And he doesn't have the luxury of foisting household chores on two teenagers under the guise of teaching them responsibility and team work. He has to scrub his own darn toilets.

I couldn't bear be away from my children and my husband knows this. So he works a job that provides us with enough stability to allow me to never leave my children's side, a job that enables me to witness every second of my kid's childhood up close and personal. He does this at great personal detriment to himself and I don't spend enough time thanking him for that.

It's my husband and the job he does which allows me to sit here and share with you all the daily foibles of living in the middle of butt-fark nowhereville amongst a gang of little hoodlums I call my children.

It's my husband and the small moments we share that spark me.

And I'm forever grateful for that.

Also? I'm grateful he is far enough away he can't strangle me for posting this picture of him:

There are benefits to having an absentee husband.

Still, come home soon. There are steaks in our freezer just begging to be grilled and we're out of cereal.

Beautiful Babies, Ugly Adults

I've made it no secret that my daughter was born out of wedlock, when I was only 20 years old. I was painfully young, naive and obviously a bit of a tramp given the fact I'm pretty sure I conceived her in the back of her daddy's car.

I. Am. Klassee.

I was barely out of childhood myself and I was getting ready to bring up a child. To say I was consumed with fears and doubts would have been a wee understatement. I was petrified. I wasn't just scared about parenthood in general, or survival, or the fact I was poor white trash one penny away from being homeless at any second, I was terrified my child would be ugly.

Because priorities? I had them.

Having had the scabs of puberty barely fall off my soul when I found out I was gestating life myself, I carried puberty's worst fear around with me for my child. What if my baby was ugly?

Every moment of my pregnancy I hoped for a healthy child, strength and wisdom to raise that child and please God, don't let my baby be ugly.

I. Am. Shallow. Too.

Eventually, my daughter was born and well, she grew into her ears. She's a beautiful child to me because she is mine. I'm biologically forced to think that but I have been told by other people not bound by those chains that my kid is cute.

I totally lucked out in the beautiful baby lottery. And by lucked out, I mean that my DNA rocks even if her father's mother thinks she looks nothing like me and is indeed a spitting image of her daddy and her entire paternal side of the family tree. Whatever. I made her.

Fast forward thirteen months and a day later and I was once again back in the stirrups begging fate for a healthy child, the strength and wisdom to raise my kids and please God, don't let my baby be ugly.

Frac came out even better looking than his sister and he never had to grow into his ears. It was a total win.

Those early years of raising babies meant there was a whole lot of growing up being done under my roof. It wasn't just my children growing up, but myself as well.

Three years later and I found myself pregnant again but this time I had a modicum of sense. The duration of that pregnancy was spent hoping for a healthy child and the energy to raise the brood I already had. I stopped hoping for a beautiful baby because I was fairly confident my child would be a good looking tyke given the fact his siblings had fared pretty well in that department.

I'm cocky too, apparently.

Then Bug was born. Broken, deformed and odd. He wasn't just invisibly handicapped, my child screamed handicapped as though someone had attached a neon sign to his forehead. Or at least that is how it felt at the time, hours after his shocking arrival and amidst the sea of hormones flooding my body immediately after giving birth to him.

I never knew my third child was going to be born disabled. When I looked at his wee twisted body it occurred to me that I never really understood the meaning of beautiful. I had heard the expression 'beauty is in the eyes of the beholder' but it wasn't until I was a parent of a child the world would never find conventionally beautiful that I understood what that phrase truly meant.

Shale laughing his arse off.

Shale was diagnosed with Moebius Syndrome when he was 8 days old. It took eight days for doctors to name his stone face and explain why my son never blinked, never smiled, never frowned. His face was smooth as glass and would always be that way.

And that hurt. Because I was vain. Because I was scared. Because it wasn't until I had a child who couldn't smile or squint or grimace that I realized how much value we truly place on facial beauty. How much we communicate non-verbally just by reading other people's expressions.

I had never felt more ugly in my life because I realized how completely immature I had been my entire existence. I had failed my child before he was even born and I've spent every day of my life ever since trying to make up for that fact.

Raising Shale taught me many things but mostly it taught me what beauty really is. And how much society values it. I quickly learned how often my son would be overlooked simply because other people couldn't read his face and interpreted his facial cues as a lack of interest. How people would whisper about my child, perturbed by him yet unable to pinpoint why. My son was easy to ignore because he was hard to read. He walked with a living mask on his face and most people couldn't even see it.

Shale crying his face off. Because his daddy dared cut his hair.

Shale never had the chance to grow up so I don't know how living with complete facial paralysis would have continued to impact him, or me or the people around him. I can only imagine how life would have treated his stony stare as he grew older.

But his smile-less face is with me always. I carry around with me an awareness of beauty that I never held before he lived. I no longer take smiles for granted and every smile I give freely or receive is a reminder to me that there are people out there locked inside their faces unable to express their feelings by merely twitching a few muscles.

There are people out there who look just like my son, united by paralysis and the understanding that beauty exists even where others can't see it.

But I see it. I see them. I hope that all of you who read this will see it too.

Today is National Awareness for Moebius Syndrome. So smile.

I know I am, and I'm thinking of my beautiful angel faced kid who made the whole world a more beautiful place every time he didn't.

Peekaboo. I see you. But will you see me?

Follicular Follow Up

So last week, I had a follicular crisis. And like any blogger worth her salt, I wrote about it. When in doubt, ask complete strangers. Works every time.

In my defense, I wouldn't have had to poll public opinion about what to do with my hair if my husband was capable of articulating an opinion other than "How much is this going to cost us????" in a slightly screechy tone.

You can't put a price on my head, Boo. Wait. That came out wrong.

Anyways.

Since that post last week, I've been gently reminded more than once that I owe you all some photographic evidence about what exactly happened to my hair.

For a reminder, this is what my hair looked like going into my appointment:

(Well, okay, not really, since I didn't even bother to comb it and only pulled it back into a messy ponytail, but this is the colour my hair was. Except my roots were about an inch longer and much more skunky looking.)

My hair was getting too long and it resembled a dollar store Barbie doll. Which wouldn't be a bad look if I had the plastic boobs and rock hard butt cheeks those cheap hussies dolls do. However, I'm a little more au naturel. (In other words, I'm saggier, softer and I can't rock the blue eyeshadow no matter how hard I try.)

My stylist is a gem. She listened to me politely and then does her own thing. And it works every.single.time. I ought to pay her more.

After the appointment, I tweeted out this picture from my car:

But apparently my twitter friends wanted to see my whole head and not just one eyeball.  Picky picky. Also, the picture doesn't actually resemble my current hair colour thanks to my iPhone's fancy camera app.

So without any further ado, here's my hair. Currently.

Just kidding. As much as I want a change, I have no real desire to walk around with greyish purple hair. I figure that time is still approaching so why rush it. I'll be a blue haired little old lady soon enough.

In the end, my lovely and talented stylist sheared several inches off and made my hair bouncy once again while taking me back to my natural(ish) colour. A dark blond. So all of this fuss, for a whole lot of nothing dramatic.

But that's okay. Because we (as in Carol, my stylist, and not me) have a plan. We are slowly going darker. Because the next time I get my hair done, I'm killing the blonde.

Because blondes are boring, hair is meant to be changed and I really like the colour red.

I can only hope the next time I go to the salon, I walk out looking a little like this:

If it works for Rhianna and Sideshow Bob, I figure I'll totally be able to rock this look.