I'll Give You an Ordinary Day

I watched this video, shared by millions of my Facebook friends, or it seemed like a million anyway.  I watched it and it is very moving, I think.  I was afraid she was going to say something happened to her sons.  But no, I mean, thank GOD, no, but it's just a book for sale.  She has just realized, since her sons have gotten older and moved out, that, um, those ordinary moments every day were super great?  Or something?  I think this is COMPLETE and UTTER BS, of course.  I mean, I think that about Maria and Veronica and Felicity, they are all so wearing on me and I just can't imagine that I will someday be, like, smoking a pipe or something and being all wise and stroking my beard and saying "ah, I really should have appreciated that day that Felicity cried for 45 minutes before she went to bed, I just didn't realize she'd move out someday!  If I only knew, how I would have loved that clingy jerkstore!".

I don't get it.  I feel like I failed some class in Mothering School or maybe I'm just not a senior yet?  Maybe it's not until you're a Senior at Motherhood High that you really miss the day you got your ass kicked, or the day after day after DAY that you got your ass kicked as a freshman?  Maybe then you think, ahhh that WAS awesome!  It's awesome to be bullied by jerks!  I wish I knew it then!

But that is just something that I don't get.  Possibly I will turn into one of those people, weeping into my - well, for me it will be weeping into my government cheese, because I will be OLD as the HILLS by the time everyone goes off to college and surely I won't be able to wipe my teary eyes with my social security check, right?  Because that will be gone?  Anyways.

Anyways, that is not my point.  I will always be a person who is allergic to bullshit and so I won't be able to be like, those dirty diapers really were the greatest!  Fine!  Whatever!

The reason that I hate videos like this, and why I hate people who are all - "Moms, watch this, and get a tissue!", is because they are not talking to me.  Not about Anthony, anyway.  Tonight while I was cleaning poop up off the floor, I was thinking about this video and thinking how the mom in it never mentioned cleaning up her almost eight year old's poop off the floor.  By eight, she is talking about baseball games and piano recitals, about football practices and playground scuffles.  We don't have that with Anthony, and we won't have them, not at eight anyway.  Not at nine or ten either, maybe.  We will never have them in any typical way.  And I don't care!  I don't, I love Anthony, however he is and he is my only  boy and this is how I think of Life with Boys, I think of it as Life with My Boy, I don't know any different.  But I'll tell you something and that is this:  you don't see me posting videos saying how you won't miss these times.  How HAPPY you'll be if your son ever stops pooping on the floor.  How you'll miss him ruining every shirt you have because he pulls you around the collar so hard.  I wouldn't say that because THAT IS RIDICULOUS!

I am a mother of a special needs child and I am also the mother of three neuro-typical children and I am messed up about it.  Sometimes I see videos like this and I think, oh good!  I love a good weeper!  And I settle in and then I am crying but NOT in a moved and sweet way but in a oh, damnit, they are not talking to me kind of way.  There is a club of Regular Mothers and I am not one of them.  I am not in the club.  I am SORT of in the club but not exactly.

My neighbor has four kids, like me, and we were talking the other day about having four kids and always having a baby.  She said that a lot of her friends had two kids, only two, and that they were the age of her oldest two kids.  So often, she said, she was the only one with a baby and boy oh boy do I know that feeling.  You feel like everyone is moving on and getting their tummy tucks and having their family "be complete" and there you are, rocking a baby, or chasing a toddler, or whatever.  It feels awful and you feel left out but at least THAT is only temporary.  I am the old mother of a little baby and I am the mother of a special needs child and I am also the mother of Maria and Veronica in the middle.

I love being their mother, I am proud and happy to be their mother.  I also think mostly every day sucks, especially during spring break and especially at the end of a long-ass winter, but no matter what I am proud and happy and lucky to be their mother.  But these videos, and people's insistence to Carpe the freaking Diem all the time, are driving me mad.