Nobody Likes a Hypocrite

According to my teenaged daughter, I am a hypocrite.

This isn't the first time she's called me on my hypocrisy, but for the most part, I rarely feel any guilt about it. Pardon me if I wear eyeliner and don't want my 14 year-old kid wearing it. I have no desire to be the parent to a raccoon-eyed heathen who looks like she is a hooker in training.

But last night, as my boys fled for safety, the two of us once again engaged in what is becoming a routine power struggle; she hurled the dreaded H word.

"Hypocrite," she seethed under her breath, half daring me to hear, half hoping I wouldn't.

All of this over the fact I informed her that if she wanted to have her girl friend spend the night this weekend, she'd have to clean up the pig sty otherwise known as her bedroom.

Pardon me for not wanting some stranger's kid entering my house, having to spend her night in filth and squalor and then run back home to tell her parents how the Redneck family doesn't believe in keeping a tidy home. I live in a rural, small community. These people talk. About everything. And on a slow gossip day, the fact my kid likes to throw half eaten apple cores under her bed and keeps stacks of dirty dishes lined up on her desk like a hoarder in training, you suddenly have the recipe for me quickly becoming a social pariah.

I manage that quite nicely on my own, thank you very much, without any help from my slovenly children.

"You're always lecturing us to keep things real. Telling us not to pretend we are something we aren't! Well I'm not tidy and my friend knows this! And you should see all my friend's bedrooms! They are way worse than mine! I'm too busy living life Mom, to clean my bedroom." (Picture me rolling my eyes so hard I hurt myself upon hearing this.)

Did I ever mention my daughter didn't start to speak until she was well past 2 and a half years old? At one point, we actually thought she might be deaf because she was so slow to verbalize. I agonized for months over her quietness, convinced there was something wrong with her.

Then one day, she opened her mouth to speak and clearly, years later, she has yet to close it. It is in moments like these, I miss those days of silence.

Most of the time, I encourage and appreciate when my children engage in pointless arguments with me. I don't agree with the old saying, 'kids are meant to be seen and not heard.' I'm not raising sheep over here. I like the fact my children are becoming critical thinkers, even if it means being called out on the carpet every now and then for my reasoning. My children keep me on my toes as they grow into smarter adults than I will ever be.

I just thought I'd have a few more years before they actually became smarter than me.

"Keeping it real does not mean being lazy. Pick up your trash, sort your laundry and make your bed! For crying out loud, I'm not asking you to wash your walls with your tongue or anything!"

Her argument held no merit with me; doing simple chores is expected in our house, it's called part of being in a family. We all have our own separate duties we perform to keep the peace of having five people under one roof and not throttling one another. If I can keep my room clean as I juggle being a freelance writer, blogger, mother, wife, taxi driver, accountant, personal chef, nurse, therapist, and human being then I expect my older children to do the same.

Fair is fair. And nothing in life is free, baby. Consider a clean room your rent for being allowed to live in this palace of ours.

Fric could sense she was losing an unwinnable battle and quickly retreated to her inner sanctum, garbage bag in tow. After a few minutes, I felt a little bad about coming down on her so harshly so I knocked gently on her door and asked to come in.

She was kneeling beside her bed, arms extended as she fished crap out from under her bed. She looked up at me warily.

"Look kid, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, but you really need to keep this room clean if you want to invite people into your space and share it. Otherwise it is kinda gross. And no one wants to be known as the gross kid, right?"

She nodded in agreement. I helped her for a few minutes and then stood up to go check on the boys.

"You know Mom, you are worse than me."

"Really, how so? My bedroom is clean."

"Maybe, but every day you invite people into our home, into our lives, every time you write on the internet. You post pictures of us, and yourself and sometimes even the house. You do skype interviews and television segments from our kitchen."

Clearly she was going somewhere with this and I had a feeling I wasn't going to like where she was headed.

"You tell some of the story, but you don't share everything. You edit. You tell us to keep things real, to be ourselves, but I have never read a post of yours stating how you left a week of laundry unfolded on the kitchen couch."

"No one wants to hear about that stuff kid. That's not interesting."

"But it's real. The unvarnished, honest truth. Wouldn't it be better if we just let our friends know we were slobs and find out if they liked us anyways?"

I looked at her, and I swear I could see the gears in her brain spinning like her hamster's exercise wheel used to in the dead of the night.

"Nice try kid. Clean up your room or your friend doesn't come over," I laughed as I walked out of her room and into the kitchen.

"Well you can't blame a girl for trying!" she called back.

She's right. Not that I'm going to tell her I'm a hypocrite. That would be like shooting myself in the foot and handing her the gun to beat me with it afterwards. I'm guilty, internet. I don't tell you everything, like the fact my dog yakked on the floor five minutes ago and I'm walking around it, hoping it will magically disappear while waiting for the kids to get home in a few hours to clean it up. Because dog vomit? Gross.

And my bed? It hasn't been made in days. Why bother? I'm the only one in it other than my puking dog and I like wrinkled linens.

My bathroom needs to be cleaned. Like now. And yet I have no immediate plans on scrubbing that toilet. I'm hoping I can convince a child to do it for me.

I routinely invite you into our lives and I never tell you that I need to clean the leftovers out from the refrigerator.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Tanis.

So welcome to my kitchen. The counters are clean, the dishes are done, but you can't sit on my couch.

Because it's covered in laundry that I need to fold.

I should also share with you, since we're being so honest, that I haven't showered in two days and I'm sitting here in a ratty bathrobe typing this.

Welcome to my real life. A life filled with a house that constantly needs cleaning and a woman who constantly falls behind in getting it done. It feels good to be honest, to keep things real. But it feels even better knowing my kid's bedroom is finally clean.

Hypocrisy for the parental win.

Now excuse me, I have some laundry to avoid folding.

 

Hear My Battle Cry

"You're such a retard."

"That's so retarded."

I've heard both of these sentences spoken within my earshot within this last week.

A family member spoke one of them.

Clearly the years of my campaigning on the internet to end the use of the R word have not translated well in my real world experience. It's easy to stand up on the internet and write essays on why you shouldn't use the R word, to place the internet on notice. But I'm finding it much more difficult to stand up against the endless waves of ignorance when I can see the whites of peoples eyes when they drop the R bomb in my lap.

It infuriates me that I have to keep educating on how dismissive and demeaning this word is, not just to my son, and to me but to everyone who loves a person who may be labeled with the dreaded R word.

It breaks my heart when my niece comes up to me and excitedly announces she has a joke she wants to tell me and the punch line is about being a retard.

My extended family drops the R word. My siblings have used the R word. They love the Jumbster. I can see it in their faces when they hold him, it reflects with every careful cuddle they share with him, every loving kiss they drop on his forehead.

But the reality of raising Jumby and raising Jumbster's siblings doesn't impact them immediately, unless I thrust him in their laps and try and cajole them into changing his diaper. Their reality is far different than mine. Jumby is just another family member, one they accept as their own but one they don't really understand.

It doesn't occur to my family members that every day I shoulder the weight of what it really means to parent a child with such extreme disabilities. They understand he has to be tube fed, and chauffeured around in a wheelchair and diapered. They know he can't speak, or walk or dress himself.

But the nuances of his life and what it means to live with a plethora of disabilities doesn't affect them. They don't have to worry about the endless medical appointments, they don't struggle daily to keep him limber, and they don't worry about breaking his bones every time he needs to be dressed. They don't feel the weight of a thousand boulders resting on their chests thinking about his medical stability and worrying that this moment may be his last.

Nor should they have to. Boo and I adopted Jumby, no one else. They shouldn't worry about whether Jumby has a thousand tomorrows or just one. They don't have to lose sleep about the quality of Jumby's daily life, or worry about what his future holds. That's what Boo and I signed up for. It's our problem to solve about Jumby's long-term life goals. To agonize over whether he should be institutionalized or not in the future. The only real responsibility Jumby's extended family has is to ensure his safety in their presence, to love him and to make him know he is loved.

So when they drop the R word, they don't know they just shot a hundred arrows of hurt into my heart.

The R word continues to slip out. And I continue to stand up, both in real life and in the online world to say that is not okay. That is my son you are talking about. That little retard you just made a joke about, that could be my child.

It still affects Fric and Frac. It breaks their heart and chaps their arses when it is a school friend who pollutes their ears with this word.

We are all standing on the shores of ignorance and discrimination, fighting for the world to see the boy we love and to cease the unending use of such a hurtful world.

It's tiring. It breaks my heart. And I stand before you to shamefully admit that more than once I've heard that word used by someone I know, or like or even love, in real life and in the cyber world and have done nothing. Said nothing. I remained silent; because it was easier, because I'm tired of pointing out that every time you unthinkingly use that word you are minimizing the struggles of disabled people and their families. You are demeaning, mocking and disrespecting a society of people who have been forced to endure more hardship and struggles than most, simply by nature of their birth.

It's exhausting. And being the primary, often single caretaker of two teens and a fragile, overgrown, forever infant already exhausts me..

But that doesn't mean this isn't a battle that isn't worth fighting, just because I'm often too overwhelmed to pick up the armor, to busy plucking out the arrows of your hurt from my heart. My children deserve to live in a world free from this contagious ignorance.

So today, I'm once more standing up before you, asking everyone to think before they speak. And I'm thanking people like Ellen Seidman who has stood beside me, for her own family, her own child and wrote a powerful post on what happens if you ask people to stop using the R word.

It's not easy standing up for what you believe in when the cacophony of the world threatens to drown out your voice. When the internet says you have no dog in this fight simply because of the title of your blog. When strangers blatantly mock you and your family and when the world wants to simply stick their fingers in their ears and pretend they can't hear you.

I may not change your mind; you may still use the R word. But I will continue picking up my shield to fight this battle. Even when it seems exhausting and futile to do so.

Jumby deserves it. And so do you, even if you don't know it.

Fric is getting ready for battle. I'm right beside her.

Where I belong.

Five Years

I didn't know it at the time but five years ago today my life changed. My son had been dead for four months and I hadn't found a way to put the pieces of my life back together just yet. I was rudderless in a vast sea of pain and I was completely lost. Grief had swallowed me whole and it was completely reasonable to question my sanity.

My husband had bought me our very first family computer a few months earlier and I spent every day searching online for something. For someone. For a single person who knew exactly what it was like to have their almost five year old child drop dead suddenly with absolutely no warning and no explanations.

I never did find that person. My search for someone to guide me through my pain was fruitless. But it was in my persistent search to find a beacon that I discovered the world of blogging. After googling the words mom and grief, I found a blog. It was a bad blog. Boring. Ugly. Poorly written. The lady who wrote it was grieving the death of a marriage not a child like I was. But on the pukey pink sidebar of her blog, she had a blog roll.

This woman, who ever she may be, I don't remember, couldn't write worth beans but she had great reading tastes. It was from this blog that I stumbled my way into the world of mommy bloggers and the blogging community. Like Alice falling through the rabbit hole, I followed one link to another, discovering blog after blog after blog. Suddenly I was in a world filled with real voices and while these writers may not shared the same pain as I was burdened with, their stories resonated with me. Reading their words allowed me to feel something, anything, for the first time in months.

What I looked like five years ago. Also known as the awkward growing out stage.

For the next 8 weeks I read. Every day, all day, as Fric and Frac went off to school and abandoned me to my silence and my grief, I sat at the computer and poured through one blog to the next. I was captivated. I may not have found what I was looking for, but I found something else, something weighty and important. I found a chorus of voices that rang true in my head and cut through the fog that clung to me.

I found bloggers.

So on Feb 28, 2006, I sat down in front of my computer and opened blogspot for the very first time and gave birth to Redneck Mommy.

I didn't know it then, but I had finally found a way to heal. I found a new identity, one that didn't rely on me being the mother to a dead child, or had ties to a disabled community I was no longer part of. For the first time since my youngest son's birth and subsequent death I was just Tanis. It has been completely freeing.

What I look like now. Also known as photographic evidence of my dorktasticness.

A lot of things have changed in the five years I've been blogging. I've made new friends, I've lost old ones. My children have grown up and I've picked up another kid along the way. My arse has gotten bigger and then smaller, my boobs have been pierced and then unpierced. Bushes have been blue and pits have been unshaven. Through it all, I've managed to avoid learning how to filter. My mother is so proud.

But one thing hasn't changed at all since the inception of this blog. The gratitude I feel for each of you who take the time to read my stories, and for every one who has ever taken the time to email me, comment on the blog or tweet at me. I'll never forget feeling the thrill and the awe of getting my very first comment on my blog. (Thanks Liz from Mom101!) Somehow, during the worst time of my life, I managed to find and build a community around me that continually inspires and amazes me and I'm profoundly grateful.

I write because my sanity demands it but I remain forever awestruck that someone out there is reading it.

So thank you. Thank you for making these past five years some of the most important years in determining who I really am, and helping me discover who I want to be.

Twas the nicest way to ring in five years, ever.

And thank you for once again voting Attack of the Redneck Mommy as the Best Canadian Blog in the 2011 Weblog Awards and earning me a place in the Bloggie's hall of fame. I really couldn't have done any of this without you. Nor would I have wanted it to.

Imaginary iPads for everyone are on me. Maybe one day I'll actually earn some damn money doing this thing called blogging so I can actually buy you the real deal.