I Have No Shame

When I was in middle school I desperately wanted to be popular. I wanted to be one of the cool kids, one of the girls all the boys flocked to and wrestled over just for a chance to sit next to me at lunch time.

It never happened. 

Partially due to the fact I was gangly, awkward and no where near hitting puberty. My knobby knees protruded out further than the invisible boobs I liked to pretend I had.

It may have also had something to do with the fact that I favoured wearing cowboy boots (still do) and baggy jeans while all the other girls wore designer clothes and rocked a pair of geeky green spectacles that took up more than half of my face.

I was cool. But only in my own mind.

In my desperate bid to become one of the cool kids, I ran for school council. I was counting on the geek factor, all the other wannabe's just like me who would toss their vote my way in a desperate bid to show everybody that it didn't matter what you looked like or what you wore, geeks were people too.

Except my fellow geeks let me down. 

I think I got three votes.

I wasn't so cool after all.

It was an awkward moment in my self-history. A lesson learned (never run for school council when you have a bandaid wrapped around your eyeglasses arm) and never forgotten.

God I miss junior high. 

Snort.

I recently learned I was nominated for two different blog awards. And in a pathetic tribute to my boobless, stringy haired, plastic spectacled geeky teenaged self, I'm putting myself before y'all and hoping that I don't end up being the laughing stock of the cafeteria.

(I still remember walking in to the lunch room that day and everyone...even my friends...started laughing at me after the vote count was published. I sat alone and ate my white bread with Cheez Whiz sandwich and vowed to oneday seek revenge on all those kids when I was a supermodel and rich.)

I'm still waiting for that to happen. It could. Right?

If you would like go on over and check out these two sites. There are some really interesting blogs that are listed and up for the vote.

I won't ask you to vote for me. That would be pathetic. And needy. And reek of desperation.

All of which would undermine my delusional beliefs of grandeur.

Heh.

(Alright damnit. Vote for me. There. Happy? I begged. Consider me down on my knees and at your mercy. We all know I'm easy. I'll damn near do anything to make y'all happy.)

Best Blog- Canadian Blog Awards

Best Canadian Blog- The 2008 Weblog Awards (scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the little green button beside my blog name.)

Both of these awards are in the early stages. I'm desperately hoping to become one of the finalists. At least then I may be able to justify to my husband how I sit around all damn day with the laptop glued to my thighs.

(I do it for the people. They need me, honey. I swear!)

Heh.

Thanks y'all.

The Journey Begins

When I started up this blog and that blog, I was struggling to stay above the choppy waves of depression and grief that were threatening to drown me. My son had only died a few short months before and I was embarking on a journey in an uncharted waters.

I was trying to figure out how to survive the death of a child. My child. My almost five-year-old son.

I had finally learned the ropes of being the parent to a disabled child and a mother to three small children. I was just getting my groove on, finally able to juggle the special needs of Shalebug along with the needs of my lovely Fric and Frac. And then all of a sudden, the carpet was yanked out from beneath me.

I was no longer the mother to three kids or the mom to a disabled child. The person I used to be simply vanished. She ceased to exist the moment I walked out of the hospital alone, with a small plastic bag filled with Bug's clothing. The only tangible evidence I had to prove I had walked in with a living child and walked out without one.

I still have that plastic bag filled with the clothes Bug wore when he died. It's folded up tightly and stored in a box tucked high up on the top shelf at the back of my closet. I don't know when or if I'll ever have the courage or the need to open it and revisit that night in my mind. I fight so hard not to remember how he looked on that emergency room table, unmoving and dead, or how his head hung at an unnatural angle in my arms as I raced him into the emergency room, I'm not sure I could actually bear the physical reminders of that night.

I don't want to remember that moment in time. I want to surround myself with the love of his memory, the warm wash of his giggles bathing my soul in love. It's hard, so very hard, to remember past the pain to recall the joy he imprinted on me. I'm haunted by both charming memories of my son and visions no parent should ever have dancing before their eyes.

It's too easy to slip into the familiar pain of grief and start missing him with a crushing intensity. It's still too easy to weep when a song comes on the radio and reminds me of him. The nightmares I have almost nightly are still too real, too vivid.

Time has helped heal my wounds but the scars still seep more often than not.

I'm not there yet. But I'm getting closer.

I've had three long years to examine myself and wade through the emotions that swirl around me like a vortex. My husband, God bless his cotton socks, has moved heaven and earth to try and make things right with me, with our family and breathe life back into the withered shell I suddenly became.

But as much as I'm grateful to my husband for his unending love, deep compassion and the constant understanding he shows me, he wasn't enough to make me rise out of bed in the morning and draw another breath.

No. The only thing that moved me out of my reverie of self-pity and grief was the broken looks on my children's face. Their blue eyes were haunted and their world turned upside down. It was my desperate desire to bring the light back into their eyes and hear the echoes of laughter that rang in my heart which motivated me.

I did what any mother would do. I sucked it up when I needed to and cried when I had to. I stopped running from the storm of pain and let the emotions rain upon myself. I sought help for the depression I had sunk into and I started taking care of myself so that I could take care of my children.

I needed to show my kids it was okay. I would be okay. They would be okay. We would be okay together. We would just take it one step, one emotion, and one milestone at a time. Together.

Time has dulled the edges of grief and I've we've begun to experience joy again. I found solace in the oddest place: myself, through my blog.  By sharing online I found a safety net of love, support and community. You gave me the courage to keep on keeping on. If I hadn't had the ability or luxury to sit at my computer and focus on the funny in my life and start anew, I'd probably be sitting in a padded cell trying to stab myself with celery sticks.

With every day that passes and every post I write, whether inane, or funny, or serious, I am taking one step closer to becoming a person I can recognize in the mirror. Not the old Tanis; she is buried with her arms tightly wrapped around her son, but a new Tanis. One I'm just starting to understand and appreciate.

Life carried on and love carried us through and eventually Boo and I found ourselves opening up our hearts and our minds to the idea of doing it all again. After much deliberation and talking we decided, as a family, we would adopt.

It's been a long journey for us. Two years in fact. When we started the adoption journey I promised myself I would share our story with anyone who wanted to read about it. I've been brutally honest in our walk down the road to snatch a child out of the clutches of government and call him or her our own.

We've been through the ringer as a family, enduring unending waits, home assessments, psychological evaluations and mind-numbing preparatory courses. We have filled out a forest worth of paper work and faced rejection.

We've survived having my blog discovered and my words tossed in my face. (Word to the wise: It's never a good idea to call the lady who holds the keys of your family's fate in her hands a bureaucratic asshat. Just so y'all know.)

We've celebrated our application approval and held our breath for the phone to ring. For a child to be dropped out of the sky and into our laps. We have waited impatiently and patiently and tried to remember there will be a light at the end of this tunnel one day, a new little redneck to call our own, another child to duct tape to my wall.

(Totally kidding dear adoption peeps. I only beat them with wet noodles. Wink.)

It hasn't been easy. There has been much whining (primarily on my part) about how life is passing us by and still there has been no sign of a child to call Redneck Child Number Four.

Then one afternoon, the phone rang and Boo and I were offered a child. We rejoiced and held our breaths. But after learning more we instinctively knew he wasn't the one. He wasn't ours. So we declined him and opted to wait for a child with more needs, a child who I could look in the eyes and know he was the right one. It was one of the hardest decisions Boo and I ever made.

Still, the choice was made and our wait begun anew. Boo went off to work and I sit at home twiddling my thumbs and blog. I have grown tired of waiting. There are only so many blogs a gal can read before her laptop starts to grow to the tops of her thighs and her ass starts to spread from inactivity.

I no longer jump whenever the phone rings. (Mostly because it takes energy. Energy I could expend clicking a mouse.) Heck, most of the time it's telemarketers or bill collectors. (Just kidding Boo. I totally pay our bills on time. Cross my heart.) I can only have so much fun tormenting total strangers before growing bored of that game, like a cat pawing at a mouse.

Which is why, when the phone rang and I didn't recognize the phone number, I almost didn't answer it. I was deeply absorbed in some mindless television drama and I was in a pissy mood tired. But at the last second I thought what the hell, it's a commercial, I may as well play with some underpaid telemarketer's mind and so I answered the call.

"Hello?"

"Is this Tanis Miller?" a delicate female voice asked on the other line.

Rolling my eyes and cracking my knuckles, I thought to myself 'let the games begin' as I answered, "Yes."

"A friend of yours gave me your name. I think I have an eight-month-old baby you will want to adopt. Are you interested?"

A chorus of heavenly angels was singing in the background as I smiled and asked her to tell me more.

My heart raced as I listened to the woman, who was about to make my dreams come true, tell me about my son.

To be continued...

I Don't Just Dream It, I Live It

After more than a decade of listening to me whining and bitching complaining about our mattress, my husband finally manned up relented and forked out the cash for a new mattress and box spring for our bed.

It was well past the time for a new one. I mean, let's face it. We bought the thing when we were young and in love. We may or may not have bounced on it so much that the springs were starting to poke through the fabric.

It was a (ahem) well-used mattress if you catch my drift. Wink, wink.

Boo was in no hurry to replace the mattress. He kept putting it off, justifying one more night, one more week on the bed of springs by telling me there were better things he could spend our money on.

Like massages from one-legged Asian midget hookers up north.

He's thoughtful like that.

Of course he wasn't worried about our mattress. That man sleeps like the dead whether a sharp metal spring is tickling his ass crack or not. The man could sleep on a bed of nails and still wake up fully rested with a morning erection looking to get some.

That combined with the fact he only has to spend four or five days actually trying to sleep on our old sagging, stained and sharp bed of broken pocket springs meant he was unconcerned with the state of our marital bed. Hell, as far as he was concerned, a lumpy mattress just acted as insurance for him. 

He knew there was no way I was going to bring home anybody else to do a little mattress dancing on our embarrassingly old sleeping pad. And if I did, he'd be able to identify the poor schlep by the scars from being stabbed by an errant metal spring while rolling around with me.

He's a clever dude, my husband. Plus he sleeps on a new, comfortable mattress at the hoity toity hotel he's staying in, 26 nights of the month.

I, however, am not so lucky. Which meant he was not going to get lucky unless he stopped being such a dumbass money miser and cough up the funds for a pretty new mattress for his princess.

Sure, it took a little persuasion of the sexy kind, but eventually he came around to my point of view. (Don't judge me people.) I've been crawling out from that marital dip so long I've permanent spinal damage. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do to get her way. Even if that means dusting off the ole knee pads.

Or agreeing to sleep in the wet spot. (Gah.)

It was a happy day not so long ago, when I eagerly watched (as I sat on my ass and declined to help) as he wrestled our new, expensive and sparkly mattress through our front door.

The kids and I gleefully hauled the old mattress out of the house and tossed it off the front deck like the true rednecks we are. Nothing says class like a stained ugly mattress sitting on one's grass like a lawn ornament.

As Boo cussed and cursed and sweated his way into getting our oversized mattress and it's brand spanking new box spring onto our bed, the children and I took turns jumping off the deck and bouncing onto the mattress below while screeching 'Cowabunga!!!" at the tops of our lungs.

We made a game out of seeing who could avoid getting stabbed by an errant spring. I lost that game, but it was well worth the wounds when I was finally able to climb on my much higher, firmer and more comfortable new pad and waggle my eyebrows at my sweating husband and ask him if he wanted to take a test drive with me on our new bed.

He may or may not have agreed. He may or may not have made me do most of the work as he whined about how much heavier they make mattresses nowadays and how tired he was from hauling that thing off the truck, up our deck, into the house and onto our ridiculously high poster bed while I played with the kids.

I may or may not have just ignored him as I broke in our new bed. (Aren't we the most romantic couple EVER?) Snicker.

I had high hopes that with our new mattress I would finally be able to find some peace at night as I tried to slumber. No longer did I have to worry about rolling into my husband's smelly armpits in the middle of the night or being stabbed wide awake as a spring poked at my sensitive bits. Nor did I have to worry about catching a boob ring on one of the sharp springs and ripping off my boob. 

I could barely contain my glee at the simple luxury of knowing I could finally sleep in peace; rest in comfort.

But I soon learned it doesn't matter how much money one sinks into the quality of their nightly foundation, bad dreams and insomnia will find you no matter whether you sleep on a bed of rusty coils or the finest feathers a swan can part with.

While I no longer wake up feeling like an arthritic 80-year-old woman who just ran the Boston Marathon the night before, I'm still having trouble sleeping. Dreams plague me nightly, thoughts and worries about adoption and life torment my nightly rest.

Last night was no different. Between a series of dreams where visions of past friends, green eyes and old tragedies twisted my psyche, I tossed and turned and tried to find a quiet moment of sleep. 

Nixon, the World's Greatest Dog, Ever, did not help with his flatulent gifts or his obnoxious snoring. Thatcher, the newest Wonder Dog and Nixon's trusty sidekick kept trying to push me off my pillow or sleep directly on my face. I despaired of ever getting any real rest and eyed the alarm clock wearily, wondering if I would still be awake when the kids finally tumbled out of bed with more energy than a rabbit on crack.

Eventually I must have drifted off. That's when Bug came to visit me like he so often does. Some times the dreams are sweet and I want to weep upon waking, wishing urgently to go back to dreamland to spend one more minute with him as his mommy. Other times the dreams are angst-filled and scary and I wake up mired in a blanket of grief so thick it threatens to smother me.

Last night was neither. My dream was more a fuzzy, garbled recollection of a memory from his short life. Shale had a habit near the end of his life, of getting out of bed in the middle of the night and crawling into the kitchen under the cover of darkness, to find his way to the kitchen cupboards.

From there he'd slip his little fingers under the door and start banging the cupboard closed, repeatedly while singing "ARGHHHHHH, AHHHHHH, UHHHHH" at the top of his little musical voice.

One such night I woke up to the repeated thunking of the kitchen cupboards and dragged my disoriented ass into the kitchen, half panicked there was an autistic robber going through my cabinets looking for silver.

I screeched like a little girl when the beady little whites of my child's unblinking eyes stared at me when I finally located the source of the banging. Bug giggled gleefully and dawning came upon me as I fully woke up and realized it wasn't a disabled thief knocking at my kitchen, just my disabled child.

I bent down to scoop him up into my arms to tuck him back into his bed so I could crawl back into my own when a disturbing odour wafted up and tickled my nose. My mommy radar kicked in and I was wise enough to turn on the stove light to survey the damage before sticking my hand into something disgusting.

Turned out Bug's diaper had runneth over. Which is likely why the little dude was awake and thumping the kitchen cabinetry. He was telling me in his own thoughtful way to get my arse out of bed and take care of his business.

In fact, there was a trail of business all the way from his bed, down the hall and into the kitchen. You could see where he had scooched so freely in his escape from his now decidedly stinky room in his midnight madness.

Bug had also thoughtfully stuck his hands into said business and painted happy hieroglyphics among various surfaces of the wall and cabinets.

My darling four year old covered in shit, my house filled with it, and I remember cussing something about him being a shit head as I tossed him into the bath, stripped his bedding and started scrubbing the floors and the walls at two in the morning.

I was reliving that moment in time (because out of all the damned memories Bug left me with THIS was the one my darling self chose to review) last night as I slumbered on my new fancy mattress and the smell was so very vivid. It was like I was reliving the disgusting moment of time and my nose hairs were curling up and falling off as I slept.

Right as I bent down to start wiping up the mess, I gagged a little in my dream and as I reached out to clean up the mess I woke up from this half nightmare, half recollection.

That's when I opened my eyes.

And found Thatcher the sidekick, sitting on my pillow not an inch from my nose, eating a piece of cat crap.

Smelly cat scat. On my pillow. On my new mattress. By my face.

Remnants of the litter box pickings she so thoughtfully brought to me were scattered on my mattress. Where I sleep. Naked.

It seemed my night was filled with shit and now so, my day.

Thatcher dropped her tasty morsel of poop when she realized I was awake and in true puppy love fashion, leaned over and licked my face with doggy love before I could even blink.

Welcome to Monday. Apparently I can't escape the shit.