Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
Posted
June 23, 2008 at
1:52 pm by
Misty
5:15 pm, Sunday June 22nd
So. Right now I am fairly inebriated, and in about two hours I must sober up to have the most difficult discussion with my child that I can imagine. No, scratch that, I most certainly can imagine one more difficult, but we’ll get to that soon enough.
Terse recitation of facts has worked well for me so far, so here goes: A close friend of mine had a daughter, Chloe, about a year ago. Chloe was born with several massive heart defects, but was plugging along as best she could. Chloe and my daughter Penny were very close, despite the age difference.
This past week Chloe underwent open-heart surgery at Children’s Mercy to correct said defects. She and her family were staying with me and mine when they weren’t at the hospital. Chloe came out of surgery perfectly fine; ten hours later she suffered a massive stroke. About thirty-six excruciating hours after that, she was declared brain dead. Very soon thereafter, she was placed in her parents’ arms and the respirator was removed. Watching that was the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced, and she wasn’t even my baby.
Here’s another terse recitation of facts for you: The universe is not fair. The universe, in fact, can suck my balls. There is no fucking sense to anything at all. Be careful when you pray, because if you ask to take a measure of someone’s pain on yourself just to spare them, then G-d might decide to take your melodramatic ass up on that offer. And finally, if G-d exists, He is one inscrutable, fucked-up bastard, and there’s not much He can do to me that would be worse than living as a human on this earth truly believing that He’s petty enough to both create pain like this AND hold all the names I’ve been calling Him lately against me. Cocksucking sonofabitch.
All of that aside, this is what I found when I logged onto PostSecret this morning, the first Chloe-free morning that’s been since she was born:
My second-fondest wish in the world, right now, is for that to be true.
Social conscience says WHAT?!
Posted
June 6, 2008 at
1:45 am by
Misty
I’m applying to be a CASA, G-d help me.
For those not familiar with the term, CASA is an acronym for Court Appointed Special Advocate. The short version is, when a child has entered the SRS system for anything ranging from neglect to abuse to behavioral issues, the Court will appoint a CASA to independently research the case and present their views on what will be in the best interest of the child (when a volunteer is available, which is sadly not always the case).
Yeah, I know it’s going to break my heart on a daily basis. But that already happens everytime I read the news, and I’m sick of just feeling sick about it.
Even before I found an established religion that resonated with me, I prayed. A lot. Even when I proclaimed myself to be a cynical hard-ass bitter atheist.
(more…)
“Excuse me, but I think your son needs therapy…”
Posted
May 18, 2008 at
5:49 pm by
Misty
Not exactly how you want to start out a conversation with your neighbors, is it? But I’m going to have to figure out some way to explain to them why I won’t allow my daughter to play with their five kids any more.
Really, it’s just the one, the four-year-old boy. We’ll call him Damien, both for the sake of privacy and because it’s frighteningly close to his actual name (the parents seem to have a fondness for the kinds of names the death-metal rockers I hung out with in high school always said they’d choose for their children, except of course they swore they were never going to have any).
I hate to admit this, but I have never liked the kid. He frightens me. Actually, he makes me want to adopt him and then spank the ever-loving crap out of him five times a day for the next year or so until he straightens up, because G-d knows, when I lay down a rule or forbid him to do something and he looks up at me with that malicious smirk in his eyes that says, “stupid lady, you think you can tell me what to do!”, I want to slap him. I’m not proud of this, and I’m not a fan of the “violence solves everything” school of parenting, but I don’t tolerate blatant disrespect from creatures small enough to be an afternoon snack for a medium-sized python. It’s just not the natural order of things.
But the problem right now isn’t the fact that he’s got a future of juvie written all over his smirking little mug, or that when he demands that I fetch him a drink from the house and I cheerfully reply, “What’s the magic word?”, he responds with, “G-d, it’s just water.” It’s his obsession with cutting people up into pieces. That’s the only game he plays, from what I can tell, and most certainly when my three-year-old daughter is playing with him. He grabs a stick, a garden trowel, a hoe, whatever’s handy, then corners her while swinging his “knife”, as he calls it, closer and closer, screech-growling that he’s going to cut her up into pieces. It’s about all I’ve ever heard him actually say out loud, as he’s completely silent when not threatening her or his siblings with butchery, so I don’t know if this is his only tone of voice, or one he reserves for his little games of junior-slasher.
But you know, I’ve never raised boys, I wasn’t even raised around them. My husband, who was once a boy himself, agrees with me that this isn’t normal, but I tried not to take it too seriously.
But the past few days, my daughter, normally as rough-and-tumble as they come, has been getting hysterical at the sight of old bruises and scrapes on her arms and legs. Like, inconsolably upset. Putting her to bed for a nap sometimes, she’ll say, “Mommy, I don’t want to get cut up into little pieces.” Clearly, this has gone beyond a somewhat-morbid child’s game over the border into Deeply Disturbing Land.
So I’ve decided she’s not playing over there any more, and they’re not allowed in our yard (we’ve already had problems with him coming up and trying to get into the back door without knocking. Now the only problem is how to tell his parents *why*. “Sorry, but I don’t want my daughter playing with a kid who’s only about two years and a misplaced hunting knife away from mutilating neighborhood pets” doesn’t seem the most tactful route. And my own experience with bullies and actual psychopaths makes me reluctant to let them know how deeply disturbed by these “play” sessions my child is becoming; you don’t hand the enemy a list of your weaknesses, you know? After (repeatedly) telling the child that I don’t want people, ANY people, coming into my yard without invitation, I’ve looked out the window on many occasions to see him sitting on our fence, just staring at the house.
Smiling a little.
Seriously, this kid creeps me the hell out.
Cowardice
Posted
April 29, 2008 at
8:25 am by
Misty
I’m a coward, and a hypocrite, and all before 8 in the morning. It’s gonna be a long day.
I always swore I was going to be direct with my child about matters of nature and death. I grew up hunting with my dad on one hand, and breeding cats with my mom on the other–I was never a child who had any illusions about animals, their place in the world or my dinner plate, or their deaths. I think I’m pretty healthy, so my husband and I decided we’d raise our daughter the same way.
Until the baby bunny, that is.
This past weekend our post-war suburban neighborhood underwent something of an unprompted, unofficial ritual, the First Mowing of Spring. It must have flushed out some wildlife, because yesterday evening we found a small juvenile rabbit crouching terrified in our lawn, not even enough instinct yet to run when people approached it. The neighborhood is overrun with large cats; he wouldn’t have lasted the night. And I have this thing about helpless infant creatures. So sue me.
We followed Operation Wildlife’s instructions, caught it with a towel, didn’t let the kid pet it, didn’t feed it, and closed it up in a box, which we put on top of the fridge, out of the way of curious three-year-old girls. Since their intake facility was closed when we called, we planned to take the poor thing in when my husband got home from work today.
Around 11 I was sitting in the living room enjoying a glass of wine and some Aqua Teen Hunger Force, when suddenly I look down and there’s a baby bunny on the floor. WTF? Checked the box–yeah, that’s our bunny. So I caught him again, put him back in his box, weighted the top down this time, and poked some airholes.
This morning Penny wakes up, and of course, wants to see the bunny first thing. I open the box and . . . dead bunny. Stiff, already. Oh, shit.
“The baby bunny’s sick right now, baby. We have to give him lots of quiet, so we can’t look at him now, okay?”
“Okay.”
Sick. Yeah. I wimped out. Instead of being Spartan Mom, and explaining to her about how sometimes animals we try to help just don’t make it, I told her it was sick. Then called my husband, and we conspired together. The bunny will be “sick” all day, and he will dispose of it while she’s napping this afternoon. When she wakes up, we’ll tell her Daddy had to take the bunny to the bunny hospital.
Well, hell. I feel bad enough already about the poor thing dying in my care without the kid going around all day brokenhearted. I’ll be Spartan Mom another day, perhaps with roadkill that wasn’t my fault.
Leave Nancy, Marie, and Esther ALONE!
Posted
April 23, 2008 at
9:14 pm by
Misty
I keep seeing sooo many blogs ridiculing that clip of the women from the LDS-breakoff compound in Texas. They’re robots, they’re brainwashed, they’re as interesting as oatmeal, they’re frumpy, they’re ugly, they’re dressed like Laura Ingalls, they sound coached . . . it just goes on. Many people are demonizing these women, but most are simply laughing their asses off at them.
Well, I’m not. I can’t see anything the least bit comical in that interview. What I see, instead, are three women who have been raised to be gentle, soft-spoken, modest, and kind, thrust into the glare of the public spotlight days after their children were taken from them at gunpoint and the safe insular world that’s all they’ve ever known was torn apart. I see three women standing up to that pressure with incredible grace and strength, doing everything in their power, from breaking their culture’s rules of personal modesty to parroting lawyer-penned lines, to show the world that they’re not child-raping freaks so that they can just get their babies back. I see a fucking TRAGEDY here, and my heart goes out to them.
I do not agree with the practices of the Poly-Mormons. Hell, I just don’t like Mormonism. I also am not a fan of child-rape. But that isn’t what happened there, and nobody seems to understand that.
Picture the scene. You’re a girl, you’re fifteen, you’ve been getting visits from the cardinal for a couple of years now. You live in a culture where there is no independent role for women outside the home. Your parents come to you and say they’ve found a man they’d like you to marry, an older man who is stable and can provide for you and your children and who will treat you kindly. They never say the words, “you have to”, but they’re implied—after all, you’ve been raised to obedience.
You’re not at a Mormon compound in Texas—you’re a free-born American farmgirl born in the year 1835. Or an English noblewoman born in 1532, or a Russian peasant born in 1746. Basically, you’re any girl born anywhere in the world before the twentieth century.
In our modern culture we seem to equate “marriage to underaged girls” with “brutal rape of babies.” Not so. These “children” were probably quite a bit less traumatized by their wedding night than I was by losing my virginity against my will at roughly the same age. Hell, they’re less traumatized than their male counterparts, countless of whom are exiled and abandoned because with the old men marrying multiple young girls, they have no prospects of a wife and family and therefore no place in their culture. But that’s another beef, for another time.
I’m not trying to defend the practices of these “cults”, although I could, to an extent. I’m defending Nancy, Esther, and Marie from the demonization that is being heaped upon their bowed heads. These women were not knowingly commending their daughters into the hands of slavering, abusive child-rapists. They were marrying them off to provider-husbands, as their culture believed. They’re not Koreshians sending their ten-year-old daughters off to a “spiritual marriage” with a slimy cult leader, they’re simply doing what their mothers did, what their grandmothers did, what YOUR great-great-grandmother probably did. They are living the life to which they were born in the best manner possible, and now that life has been torn out from under them. Imagine what you’d feel like if suddenly THEY were the majority, and came storming into your home and confiscated your children because you’d been a horribly abusive monster for letting your 17-year-old daughter dress like a hooker. Myself, I’d be a pissed-off, fire-spitting, enraged dragon-lady. I would not have the strength to sit in front of a camera and quietly, gently, and smilingly defend my way of life. I’d make an ass out of myself, and where would that get me?
Again, I’m not saying that I believe the way these people live is “right”. I’m also not saying it’s “wrong”. It’s most certainly different, but not so much so in a historical context. I’m just saying that no matter the findings of abuse that may or may not come out of the investigation, there is no call to humiliate these women further with public ridicule. They have suffered more in the past few weeks than you or I, G-d willing, will ever suffer in our entire lifetimes. They are terrified, they are lost, and they are despairing. And yet they still have the strength to go on a television program where they knew they were going to be torn apart for their beliefs, and answer questions calmly, gently, and smilingly. They have comported themselves with more grace than I could ever hope to. That’s not “brainwashing”, folks, that’s fucking CLASS. I admire these women for that. And that’s all I’m going to say on the subject.
Boobs, nuns, and savings plans
Posted
April 20, 2008 at
8:30 pm by
Misty
These conversations always seem to happen when I’m elbow-deep in bread dough.
“Jump, Mommy kangaroo, jump with me!”
“Not now, Baby kangaroo.”
“Jump with me!”
“Mommy kangaroo hasn’t been that big into jumping since puberty, hon.”
“Mommy kangaroo has big boobies. I’ve got little boobies. When I get really bigger, I’ll have big boobies and then I can’t jump.”
What am I teaching her with my laziness and unsupportive bras? That she can’t jump once she gets boobs?
Then again, there’s genetics. I was a C-cup in sixth grade. Her father’s mother didn’t sprout until high school, but by the time she graduated she was 40-24-36. Unless there’s something *very* freaky in the water, my little munchkin is going to look like she’s 20 before she gets her learner’s permit.
“Honey?”
“What is it?”
“You’ve got financial planning with your company, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You need to make an appointment with them. Discuss savings plans with the goal of being able to afford a Swiss convent school in about ten years.”
“Is Penny talking about her boobies again?”
“You know it.”
“Have you tried telling her she’s really a boy?”
“Honey, we can’t afford private school. You think we’re going to be able to foot *those* kinds of therapy bills?”
“Point made. Just start in with the ’sex is evil’ talk.”
“I’d rather leave it to the nuns.”
Domestic Violence Theatre
Posted
March 25, 2008 at
6:15 pm by
Misty
No matter how badly I was lost, I should have known I was on Troost, just by the car in front of me.
‘94, ‘95 maybe, Ford Festiva, patchy paint, shocks sagging comically on the driver’s side. Well, no wonder, the woman behind the wheel must have been at least four hundred pounds, if her mammoth neck and sloping glacier shoulders were any indication.
The passenger was a man, average-sized, in do-rag and enough bling that it shone even at the back of his neck, from one car back. He was getting the ever-loving shit beaten out of him.
I was yelling obscenities at the driver, probably cursing her to die of syphilis in a back alley of Calcutta, because of her driving. Once I saw exactly *why* she was driving like a retarded tweeker on sedatives, though, I just couldn’t help but follow.
You’d think that such a violent argument would require her to make some movements of her head and body that didn’t involve her right fist, but you’d be wrong. But no. Of course, maybe this wasn’t an argument, maybe this is just how these two people pass the time on a Tuesday lunchtime drive through downtown.
Anyway, about twice, maybe three times per block, and nearly incessantly at red lights, that fist went. Pow. Pow. Pow. She looked like she knew what she was doing, like she did this a lot. Then again, so did he. Several times his head recoiled from her blows with such force that it rebounded off his window and hit her fist again of its own accord. At times she maintained a rhythm reminiscent of those balloon-on-a-rubber-band punching toys I loved so much as a child. No slapping, no grabbing, just punch, punch, punch to the side of his head, which, when it wasn’t being buffeted about like a pinball, was bowed over his lap.
I finished the drive to my husband’s work in a state of wonder. As in, I wonder if she supports him financially, or can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, or even less likely, if he deserved it. And I wonder why, if I saw a woman being beaten like that, I’d have been on the phone to 911 before the second punch landed, but in this case, I just followed for half a dozen blocks like the scene before me was a particularly engaging television program.
Mostly, though, I just wonder what more ludicrous bits of street theatre this strange new city has in store for me.
Transgressions In Parenting
Posted
March 18, 2008 at
7:15 pm by
Misty
My munchkin has had an adventurous morning. After filling up a sketchpad with pictures of all the important people in her life (Auntie Lissa, Pizza Lady, Mommy, Daddy, MeeMaw, PaPa Boo, and Miss Nora, in that order—I’m happy to report that she works in accurate color representation; every picture has brown hair, except for “Mommy”, which is crowned by blue scribbles), she’s dug into the mountain of stuffed animals and dolls in her room and emerged with her two current favorites, which happen to be from my own pre-mommyhood collection.
The first is an Amish (or maybe Mennonite) doll, beautifully hand-crafted and clutching a scrap of antique patchwork quilt. And of course, no face. Well, there’s a patch of muslin where a face would be, but no features. Or at least, no features until she became quite distressed about that fact last night and I dug out the embroidery floss.
The second is much cuter in my opinion, although many may disagree. Anyone out there remember the old-school flash animation “Radiskull and Devil Doll”? (Click “view Linux version”, it’s the only one that works.) Long before I met my husband, a gentleman in pursuit of my affections gave me the plush Devil Doll from their long-defunct merchandise page.
So now Penny’s made a playhouse behind the sofa, where Devil Doll is feeding Mostly Faceless Amish Baby a bottle and singing it songs about frogs. Yes, I have let her watch the cartoons, which she found highly amusing, so every now and then that indescribably cute three-year-old voice can be heard to coo, “I love you, Devil Doll.” Still, I’d much rather have her playing with stuffed representations of mythological demons than a Bratz doll. I’ll buy her the complete “Venereals” set of GIANTmicrobes before I let her get her grubby hands on one of those slut-indoctrination tools.
Speaking of which, how freaking hard is it to find a simple coloring book at WalMart? Impossible, apparently. I usually limit her to blank paper, but lately she’s been working (and succeeding) at coloring within lines, and is also obsessed with SpiderMan (although thanks to her uncle, she sings the theme song with the “Spider Pig” lyrics, and the hell if I’m gonna correct her), so I figured we’d take a jaunt to pick up a few coloring books and a new set of markers. And since we needed a new water filter and bubble bath (which Target doesn’t sell, the asshats), we went to Big Box Hell.
Doesn’t anyone buy their children coloring books anymore? Not if they’re relying on WalMart for their shopping experience, they don’t. We left without the water filter, because I was getting trailed by employees for my outbursts, which were along the lines of, “Well, Penny, I guess ‘artist’ is out of the question, you’re going to have to be either a prostitute or a mechanized battle unit when you grown up.”
We’ve also been working on correcting a bit of vocabulary she’s picked up from me. Since having her, I’ve worked seriously hard at limiting my severe case of guttermouth, and succeeding, for the most part. Hell, it’s even bled over into my writing. But the last ones to go are always your exasperated exclamations, which means that for a few weeks, when Penny was angry or frustrated at me, she’d let out with a “G-ddammit, Mommy!” Yeah, color me chagrined. We’ve got it mostly licked, though—the offending phrase has been replaced with a heavily-coached, Shirley Temple-reminiscent “Oh my goodness gracious!”
And lastly, since we cut out almost all television (in the evening she *sometimes* gets to watch something like Blue Planet or Man vs. Wild with us–she seriously digs watching Bear eat snakes and bugs), we listen to a lot more music during the day. And I’ve discovered that she enjoys my music at *least* as much the few bits of “child-oriented” music we’ve collected for her. She’ll choose The Dead Milkmen over The Laurie Berkner Band any day, and I’m cool with that. She really digs Frank Zappa, and as I type she’s dancing around the living room to Tori Amos’ “Happy Phantom”.
All in all, I think we’re doing a pretty good job, which is reassuring since we’re planning on getting knocked up again within the year. Keep your fingers crossed for a boy, because the name Vinny Nuckolls is just too perfect *not* to be used, you know?
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