My Mysterious New Backbone

Just wanted to take a moment to update the situation with my oldest son, The Sweet One. Thank you all for the kind comments to my last blog about him. It really meant a lot to me, to know that others understand where I am coming from :) The situation is different now, but no less scary for me as a mom. February of this year, The Sweet One "came out" as bisexual. It was a scary time for us, especially for Hubby. I think we were well prepared for it because we had already been dealing with the bullying. At least it wasn't completely out of the blue. That would have been harder to deal with. Originally, he told us he was gay. Well...he told me that anyway. I wanted to be cautious and urged him not to label himself at this age. Like I said before, our morals dictate our behaviors no matter what our preferences are! But, he felt like he needed a label. I understand that though. I understand the need to feel confident in your actions and even in your own mind. A label, even though it has the potential to be damaging, is solid and concrete. It sometimes can be used as something to hold on to when nothing else makes sense. This is totally not related, but I have used my title of nurse as a platform to stand on, and an identity to push myself to perform in situations I knew that I could not handle. It was the foundation I needed to help myself know that yes, I could do this difficult thing as a nurse, even when as a person it was too much to handle. I'm not sure that's what he meant, but that's how I understood it. For him to be able to stand up for himself, as a bullied person, he needed a place to start from. He's almost grown. I can't make these decisions for him. I don't even think I can influence him anymore than I already have. I've done my job, I've left my mark. One of the things I have learned about and for myself is that the world is not black and white. Motherhood is muddy. I can have all the opinions I want about other people's kids, but it's not so easy when it's your own child. I'm here to tell you that right now. I would like to say that I handled it well, but the truth is that I did struggle. I struggled with my personal opinions about homosexuality (which were that it is a sin, but so is my mouth so who am I to judge?), I struggled with worrying that he was acting out the trauma of the bullying (he quickly set those fears at ease with a few stories dating back to elementary school) and I also, to be honest, struggled with my faith. I'm still struggling with my faith somewhat. No, that's not correct. I am struggling with my faith "community". I have no problems with God. I have no problem with my son. I have a *HUGE* problem with other Christians' actions towards my son. Note to them: You are not being judged by him. You are not responsible for his actions, or preferences. YOU are not his mother. I tried to keep quiet for many months about his orientation. I figured, it was his business and he will handle it as it comes to him. Mostly, that is still true. But, I find myself becoming more and more defensive as time passes. This is what I recently told a friend, I need my son to know that I love him. Period. I don't care about what others think of me for it. If I have to march in the Gay Day parade wearing a rainbow striped shirt for him to know that I love him....where's my shirt?? I don't care if my brand of faith differs from yours at all. In fact, I could honestly care less. I'm not asking anyone what they think about it, or what they would do, because in reality, unless your child is gay, you have NO idea what my family has gone through. A very sweet older couple in our church recently came forward as having a gay adult son, whom they shunned and now are trying to re-connect with. They're advice was this: Love him. Never let him feel like you don't love him. Even if you have to keep your mouth shut about his life, his choice in partners, his choice in friends, whatever, make sure that he knows you love him and that is what is more important than being right. I think that is advice that I can live by. Since his announcement, he has taken the time and given himself the permission to "learn" more about himself, which is amazing considering I still can't decide if I like red peppers. He has dated a few girls and a few guys and has decided that he likes both, for different reasons. For now, he has chosen the label Bisexual. That may change with his life and experience. I may end up with a daughter in law, or a son in law. Both are wins for me, as long as he is loved. For now, as long as he choses the label son and lets me carry the label of mother...that's all that matters to me.

Late Post from the World's Worst Mom

In my mind I am an old lady. Here I was, all satisfied with myself for posting about Father's Day and The Sweet One's birthday and about half way through my shift at work today, I realized that that I totally missed posting about The Mouth's birthday, which was on the 5th.

Now this may not seem like an unforgivable crime unless, like me, you are prone to montage-type hallucinations of the future in which your children have been driven to the Psychiatrist's couch my something you have said or done. Side note: a lot of my futuristic hallucinations involve my children in therapy...nevermind.

So, without further ado:

This is The Mouth.

I have named him The Mouth for blogging purposes because, well, he talks a lot. I plead the 5th on where he inherited that trait :)

So, his birthday was a couple weeks ago, but in my defense Hubby was in the middle of a very long medical ordeal and despite trying my best to keep that separate from my son's birthday celebration, my brain really wasn't focusing at the time. A couple of years ago The Sweet One decided that he was too old for cake and ice cream birthday parties anymore so we started a tradition of taking him and a couple friends to do something cool on his birthday. I think he was turning 13 at the time, and this was an outward way to express his "teenage-hood". So, it goes without saying that of course, his little brother was suddenly "too old" for parties as well. We've been doing the "special day out" birthday for the two older boys ever since.

This year, The Mouth decided that he wanted to go to the local go-kart track/amusement place for his birthday. Because of Hubby's medical issues, guess who was left to go go-karting with four 11 yr old boys? Correct. So, we show up at this place, which is slammed because it's the first Saturday of Summer Vacation. As soon as we check in and get our bracelets guess what happens?? The bottom falls out of the largest storm cell to pass through in several weeks. I literally checked the weather on my phone thinking that certainly this was like a rogue tropical storm that I wasn't aware of. That's how wicked this thing was. We didn't even get to ride the go-karts once. In fact, no rides for us at all. Everyone (which in this particular park happened to be about 200 people) had to hang out in the arcade to keep dry.

So, we're shoved into this tiny arcade, which is already loud and stuffy, waiting for the rain to stop. We wait...and wait...and wait. Thirty minutes into it we decide to go ahead and have our pizza now since there wasn't anything else to do and it sure beat standing at the windows with our faces pressed against the glass.


One Cheese pizza did not really help the situation at all since it's life span was exactly two minutes long. Now it had been raining for an hour and I was starting to severely sweat the fact that I was supposed to have these boys home at a decent hour, we hadn't done anything fun yet and all the cheese pizza was gone. I finally tracked down a manager and did my best "I know this isn't your fault, but I was just wondering where my money is going since we are standing here doing nothing and the sun is going down" face. As overwhelmed as she was, and believe me -with an arcade built for about 50 people that was now holding about 200- she was way overwhelmed, she really was great. After talking with her and asking Birthday Boy what he wanted to do, it was decided not to postpone for another weekend. I mean, it's summer in the South...it rains ever day here during Hurricane Season. Postponing it didn't guarantee anything and even the children knew it.


So, she made us an offer we couldn't refuse: $40 worth of arcade tokens and three games each of Laser Tag. This is a picture of four 11 yr old boys discovering a real "vintage" Ms. Pac Man/Galaga game. He totally asked me if he could have one for his room. I teared up a little. Two hours later all the tokens were gone, all the Laser Tag games were played and everybody had bag of useless crap from the token store.

I did get them all home by bedtime and no one cried, fought or broke any bones. In Boy-Land that's a home run kinda day. I missed having Hubby with me to navigate the mess but somehow even in the midst of all of his medical drama he had the time to text me...."Sucks to be you :)" Jackass.

In the end they all raved about what an awesome birthday it was, which was good for me to hear since the entire time I was staring out the window at the tree branches flying by, I was explaining myself to my child's imaginary-future-shrink. I learned that boys will always be happy if you feed them and give them game tokens and that laser tag is so a real sport. I'm just happy I lived to tell the tale :O

Happy Birthday to my Mouth! Hope this year is super awesome, just like you.

A Family Affair

I normally don't blog during the weekend, but The Ankle Biters are sleeping in this morning. Late sleeping is not something that normally happens when Hubby is home, but he is sleeping too. Why am I awake when there is no one else awake? Because I am cursed with Internal Weekend Alarm Clock. Monday through Friday I have to drag myself out of bed, sometimes at 8:00 AM even, to face the day and the only reason I can do that is because I know that if I persist in stumbling I will stumble into the coffee pot. Truly, the idea of coffee is the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. Sad. However, on the weekends, for no explainable reason, my eyes spring open at daybreak. Depending on the time of year this could be as early as 6 AM! This happens on vacation too. It truly is one of the most frustrating things. But, I digress. The reason all my men are sawing logs like lumber jacks this fine October morning is because we had us a night on the town last night! WooHoo!
We had been planning this since last week, but money was too tight last weekend to allow it so we aimed for this weekend. Our aim was true, or more importantly, the check cleared the bank, so we decided to take the boys out on the town. The best part about this story is that we didn't tell them anything. I spent the whole day secretly texting Hubby and looking up movie times when there weren't busy-body boys looking over my shoulder. Finally, we settled on a plan and Hubby came home half an hour early to start the fun. We told The Ankle Biters to change clothes because we were going to town. They were somewhat incredulous about that one. The Mouth, my 10 year old son, decidedly announced that we must be doing something great because they were being made to dress up. To this I answered that being made to wear CLEAN clothes is not the same as dressing up. I do have to add that when he said "dress up" he means that I handed him a polo shirt and a pair of jeans, but he was however still wearing his sandals. Go figure. We got them all loaded up, after we shoo'd away a new FEMALE friend that came to visit my oldest (14 year old) son, who I will name The Sweet One. This female visitor is monumental in our house and I'm going to devote a whole post to her later. Trust me, Mom has things to say. So, we finally get them all in the Grocery-Getter and we head out. There is much speculation in the back seat about what our destination is. I hear all kinds of chatter going on but no one guesses correctly. We drive to the next town over and pull into the Walmart. Groaning happens in the back seat. The Mouth spouts off, "You made me wear a shirt with a collar to come to Walmart??". Hubby suppresses a snort, which he has to do a lot when The Mouth speaks. I tell him again that clean clothes are not the same as dress clothes and we head inside. Hubby's plan is to get them all new baseball gloves. He and The Sweet One are playing softball with the Church League and The Sweet One's glove fell apart at practice Thursday night. The Mouth isn't playing ball yet, but has shown a considerably amount if skill and will probably start playing city league ball in the Spring. My chest swells with pride! My 7 year old, Mr. Funny, isn't big enough to play, but we don't want to leave him out so he gets one too. We spend a little time looking and trying on gloves before we finally decide which ones to buy. Mr. Funny ends up with a new ball as well because he is cute and we are suckers. Any other excuse I give you would be a lie. So, we look around a little more and Mom decides on a new bread knife. (The back story on this is that there was only one. I complained about having to buy a cheap knife that probably wasn't sharp enough to slice bread, came home to try it out and promptly sliced my finger open. Lesson learned.) We FINALLY check out and Mr. Funny announces that he likes restaurants. This is his way of asking if we can go out to eat. Again suppressing a snort, Hubby tells him we'll think about it. By the time we make it to the van, Hubby tells the boys that we can eat out tonight, making it sound like a last minute decision when in fact we had planned for it. We drive to Wendy's, eat our food and load back up, to go home the boys think, but we had more in store for them. When we drove around the corner to the Theatre the back seat got VERY quiet. I think they were all holding their breath. Afraid that if anyone breathed it might blow away any chance they had of seeing a movie that night. Because we have just bought the house and had to save for a year prior to that to be able to afford the house, we have not been able to see many movies lately and further more the boys know not to ask. So absolutely no one asked to see a movie at all. Trying not to smile, I told the boys to come up with me to see what was playing. The smiles on those faces...that is what I was waiting for. To see pure joy on the faces of my Ankle Biters...that is worth the effort and saving that went into planning our night out. So, we spend the next 3 hrs watching movies we have each seen more than 100 times, but with the added bonus of 3D. Because we had seen them so much, the best part about the whole experience was saying the lines along with the characters and noticing things and sounds you only notice on the big screen with megawatt surround sound. It truly was one of the best theatre experiences of my life and I got to share it with my most favorite men on the planet. Watching them watch those movies, the smiles and laughter (like they'd never seen it before), the dancing and twitching, these are the reasons we save and plan and spend and stay out until midnight. These are the people that make my life worth living...they are my reason.