I’ve rambled on endlessly in this space about trying to break the circles that surround my family’s history…of mental illness, of abuse, of neglect, of just generally being really shitty people. My brother and I both have struggled with this since before we had kids, more-so after. We both have days when we lay in bed at night, taking our searching moral inventories, balancing what we did that day against what was done to us and hoping the plus goes in our columns.

More often than not, however, those moments happen on the hour, on the half-hour, minute-by-minute. When something like what is ingrained in not just our memory but our flesh and our DNA becomes so wrapped into every minute of your life, it’s a battle of epic proportions to rise above it. You blink, you forget for just one second what you know you should do, and you’re throwing a child across a room because that’s what you know to do. That’s what you learned. That’s the kind of person you were born to be

Except, if you’re really really on top of it, it’s not the kind of person you are at all. We are really, really on top of it, and more importantly, we’re really afraid that we’re not. There are no better motivating factors in the world than fear and love.

As so we fight every day to make sure that our kids lives don’t even bear a vague resemblance to the lives we had. And you know what? We’re doing it. I’ve had kids for 12 1/2 years, he’s had kids for 9, and so far we’ve managed to raise kids who couldn’t comprehend our lives if they tried. They’ll never know anything we knew (except Douglas Adams, of course) and they’ll never see anything we saw (except Labyrinth).

Well, at least, not by our doing.

The truth of the matter is that somethings are just out of your control, maybe destined to be, maybe just sickeningly predictable because kids are kids.

A few weeks ago my brother called me to tell me that his oldest almost-but-not-quite broke his middle son’s arm. I laughed and asked if I should get the jump rope ready. He laughed, too, but only a little, because what he knows and I know but they don’t know and that you don’t know is that when I was four, he broke my arm with nothing more than a jump rope, a set of bunkbeds, an astonishing-for-six-years-old understanding of basic physics and a strong desire to again be an only child.

Like,’ bone sticking out at an angle bones don’t stick’ broke my arm. Like, ‘a night at the ER and a splint and a sling on the arm that I wrote with, right before I started kindergarten’ broke my arm.

This is why I can kick your ass at pool today, because I can shoot with both hands. Everything has a silver lining.

But his kids did not succeed in reenacting one of the more traumatic events of our childhood (what happened after isn’t exactly fit for discussion in polite society, if you know what I mean) but they did remind us how fragile the line we walk on is, the one between what is in our control and what is not.

And then, of course, last week, the phone rings at way too early for the phone to be ringing and it’s my brother, who just says, “So…” and sits there on the line, breathing. I went through the Rolodex of people in our lives with whom I have not yet found closure with, and picked which one I was prepared to tuck into a casket with my unresolved issues before I asked what happened.

He said, “So, 2of4…”

And I said, “Oh no he didn’t…”

And he said, “Yup, going into surgery. Best case scenario, 3 pins. Worst case scenario, 3 pins and a metal plate holding the bones in his arm together for life.”

And I said, “Bunk beds?”

And he said, “Better. Dog pile.”

And I said, “Do I need to get out the jump rope?”

And we had a really good, long, nervous as all fuck laugh because we are learning that, though we can’t stop the timeline of history from repeating itself, we can stop the way the story plays out. Now we have the excuse, and quite possibly the responsibility, to share a little bit of our story with our kids, albeit re-written slightly, and that is a really exciting prospect. The idea of being able to look at our kids and say, “Yeah, that happened to us, too, this one time that we were really bored and testing the laws of gravity…” is foreign to us, and so is letting go of all that old shit we lug around with us every day.

But not every circle has to be a scary thing. Not every pattern needs to be broken. Neither do any more arms, children. You’ve made your point. Now get with wrapping each other in bubble wrap and staying in one piece forever, because you’re giving my brother and me nervous disorders.

Not at all unrelated aside: I have a new post up at Polite Fictions, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I want to start by clarifying for you that my children are very kind people. Mostly. They stick up for the little guy. They get into fights on the bus that end in their heads getting smashed into the windows because they will not let some kid, no matter how big or popular he is, say the N word in their presence. They start to smash ants with their shoes and then one of them says, and I quote, “Wait, what will his mother do after this?” and then they stop and rescue those very ants from the Driveway of Doom. They thank me every single night for dinner, even though I’ve told them a bazillion times that it is my moral, legal and ethical duty to feed them, and no thanks are required. They call adults Mr and Mrs, or Sir and Ma’am. They are respectful of adults, (possibly only) when in the presence of said adults.

Basically, I’m saying my kids can queue like motherfuckers. And that they’re nice people, generally, when they have to be. Of course, they are but children, and I am slightly biased. But still, I think I’ve done right by them, and even you would agree, I imagine, if only you were capable.

I’d also like to state for the record that two out of the three of these Eddie Haskels nice kids are vegetarians. I won’t even attempt to take credit for this, even though I am a little proud of the fact. Their father works at a restaurant; a very nice restaurant where they wear tuxedos to serve you and specialize in dicing up a specific species of animal in all sorts of beautifully over-priced arrangements. I am not in the business of killing beasts of burden for gangsters…only the English language, but I’ll freely admit that of all the things I’d like to quit, eating animals is probably the most unlikely. You see, I have this thing that happens to me every month called a period, and it’s not your average, “Oh, how inconvenient and annoying this monthly uterine-lining expulsion is”, it’s someone shaking up a pub can of Guiness real hard and then poking a hole in the can. Every drop of liquid in my entire body rushes for equally-pressurized pastures and once the iron is all gone, there’s really only one thing I can do to get it back.

Enter cows.

And I am sorry for this. I really, truly wish I could show the same level of professional courtesy that I have come to expect, nigh, demand, the animal kingdom show me back. On an intellectual level, I am 100% again the consumption of animals but on the animal level, I need medium rare steak like Kathy needs Regis. However, I make up for the sins of myself and the father with the fact that two of my children have, all on their own, written off meat of any kind, simply because they don’t want it anymore.

Well, one of them did. The other one did because it gives him an ‘angle’ with which to pick up hot chicks. Bygones.

I mention all of this so that you’ll understand that when those boys, my darling sons, showed up shrieking at the back door with first a tiny little frog, and then a fat, bumpy toad, and lastly an ohmygodsoslimy tree frog, I tried to dissuade them from keeping them. I reminded them that all of God’s creatures have mothers and homes and lives and who are we to dictate the fortunes of another living thing? They agreed, but were overcome with the pre-pubescent need to watch stuff crawl about their bedrooms. Stuff that isn’t in the laundry basket. They kept  the frogs and the toad and we are now proud pet owners with a moral, legal and ethical duty to see to it that those creatures remain alive and moderately thriving for as long as we are capable.

And see? There’s this thing called the Food Chain, and how it works is that if you are able to create brick walls that won’t blow down if wolves huff and puff on them, you get to live at the top of the food chain. Also, if you run really fast. If you are able to skeeve mothers out and eventually be dissected in middle school science rooms, you get to live in the middle of the food chain. If you live in old cardboard egg cartons and require only a little rock salt to survive, you are unfortunately sent to the bottom of the food chain, and that is where our paths have crossed today.

It’s not that the kids were actually thrilled to watch you die, it’s that they were overly excited to finally partake in the Circle of Life. Their food comes from pantry shelves and grocery store coolers. They’ve never known the thrill of the hunt, they’ve never had to strategize their meals. They’ve never had to use cunning and camouflage and their tongues to catch anything (except chicken pox) (which I gave them) (shut up). So when they saw Tull (their toad, brotha from anotha mutha to Jethro) lurking in the burrow he’d dug for himself, blending in seamlessly with the moss and driftwood surrounding his admittedly gross as all fuck body, moving nothing but his eyes, watching every spastic little hoppy move you made, I had no choice but to call them over. It’s my duty as a mother to teach these children science. And so, together we watched in breathless wonder as you stumbled closer and closer to our lurking friend, and I just want to assure you that the screams and fistbumps that followed your instantaneous capture and descent into the admittedly gross as all fuck bowels of our toad were not in celebration of your death, but merely in respect for the grandness of the natural order of things.

Because we salute the Earth, and all her creatures great and small, but particularly ones with really, really freaking long oh my god so totally awesome tongues.

With regrets to your cricket brethren, I bid you adieu. May you receive your 40 virgins or, you know, a job ruling over a bunch of whiny humans on Earth. Either way, really.

My nine year old is a Pisces. That means that he’s emotional, and that he’s conflicted, and that everything in his life is driven by his feelings. My eleven year old is an Aries, which means nothing goes further than his thick head. He finds reason for everything, he thinks everything through, and emotions run about a 2 on the Importance Scale in his life.

I was born 15 minutes off the cusp of Pisces and Aries, so I’m about as close to both as you can get without having an evil twin growing out of your throat. This just means that I get both of my kids pretty well. This also means that we all have birthdays in the next 44 days; just sayin’.

*ahem*

The differences in my children make my life totally complete, absolutely fascinating, and consistently inconsistent. They need two totally different styles of discipline, affection, encouragement and socialization. My oldest son can (and does) get lost in design and programming and science. My youngest son needs people. He needs physical interaction just to maintain his sanity. He needs friendships and he needs love.

Conveniently enough, he found both this weekend.

He’s been fairly epically in love twice before, which is saying something since the kid hasn’t been alive for an entire decade just yet. His first One True Love was Sam. They were five and she taught him how to french kiss on the playground at school one day. She was a troubled little girl from a troubled little home and he was, well, him, and those waters run deep. They were soulmates, best friends, two halves of a whole and he still refers to her as the great love of his life, four whole years later.

The second girl was Natalie. Natalie looked almost exactly like Sam, but didn’t have the troubled-childhood thing under her belt. She was older than him, popular, athletic and smart. She was the girl that every little boy wanted to have the attention of, but my son was determined to win her over. We talked a lot about how to treat a girl, how to win her heart, and he agreed that it would be best if he was just nice to her. He went out of his way to include her in their playground games, but didn’t treat her like “a girl”….he just played with her, like she was every other kid. He didn’t nag her, but he didn’t ignore her, either, and he didn’t tease her like most of his friends did. And then one day, once the groundwork was laid and she knew who he was, he wrote her a private letter. He told her that looking at her was like looking at angels, and that when she was near him, it was as if he was in heaven.

The boy’s good, yo.

Aside: I only know about this letter because he left it at his friend’s house and that friend’s mom found it. It was so adorable, she actually hand-delivered it to Ms Natalie. After she called me to read it to me.

But then we moved, again, and 2of3 has been reluctant to make new friends here. You move a kid far enough away from everything he loves enough times, and he starts sheltering his heart.

He’s got a few buddies here; not anyone close enough to get into really good trouble with, but just enough to have a kid or two to eat lunch with. 2of3 is the kind of kid who needs one person, just one, that is all his own. He needs that soul-crushing, all-consuming connection with someone, and without it, he’s just not the same kid. Which sucks, because he’s manically awesome when he’s whole.

When we had some friends over for dinner on Saturday, we assumed their daughters would be friends with our daughter. She’s 4, they are 6 and 7. We figured our 11 year old would lock his door and hide in his room the whole night, and we figured that 2of3 would spend the night showing the grown-ups how far he can shove his fingers up his nose while the girls all played together.

Wrong.

By the end of the night, their 7 year old and my 9 year old were in a tent out back with a flashlight, a board game and some popcorn, just hanging out. They played video games together and played tag with each other and had juice boxes together.  They met, they wooed, they made exchange of video game cheat codes.

He absolutely adored her. Admittedly, she IS pretty flipping adorable, but after they headed home for the night, I went up to the boys rooms to send them to bed. I found 2of3 on his brother’s floor, slowly and deliberately pushing a little skateboard up and down a little Tech Deck ramp, and I asked him if he had fun. He sighed. I asked him if we should invite the girls to his birthday party, and he didn’t even look up at me when he said, “Mom, I think I have a crush on her.” I said I thought he did, too, and he said, “But she’s only seven. I’m going to have to be really nice to her, huh?”

Yes, kid, yes you are. I have a feeling it won’t be all that hard for you to pull really nice off, though.

I am the second child in my family; the first was a boy. Of course, that means I think all families should lead off with a boy, then follow up with the girl. It’s the natural order of things, as I’ve seen it.

It’s nice having a girl second instead of first because the house is full of legos, so they’re instantly the cool toy, which means I’m stepping on plastic flesh-shredding landmines for 10 extra years.  When I take her to get a video game, I offer Backyardigans and she picks Phineas and Ferb, which is great because I don’t have to listen to yetti-yetti-YETTI! all day long, but Phineas and Ferb is targeted at 8 year old boys, who can read, so instead of her playing Nintendo dress up with penguins and mounties and shit while I nap work, I’m making Ferb dig through nasty old trash piles to find nails to fix a fence that has nothing behind it. Seriously, rip-off. And instead of having a bazillion naked, decapitated Barbies in her bed, I tuck the kid in every night with Crystal King, because he’s her baby, and then have to use tweezers try pry most of his body parts out of her flesh in the morning.

I’m beginning to think I may have done this backwards.

But she gets two big brothers, and that makes it worth it. They love her and protect her. They guide her. They help her. They teach her how to do important things like throw and catch a ball, text message, pee standing up, swear in context and have peanut envy.

When it was just me and the boys, the issue of genitalia really never came up because duh, everyone has the same junk. I was diligent about never letting them see me naked, so they only had their father to reference. If dad has it and they have it, everyone has it, right? Now, with the girl, she knows there’s a division of goods here. And that child wants a peanut. She wants to be like her brothers. She has a peanut in her coochie, dammit. I’ve long since given up arguing this with her. Fine, have your peanut. We’ll deal with this later.

Later has come.

She was a chipmunk the other day, because she’s always something, and she walked right up to me and said, “Momma, I a chipmunk!” and I said super! She said, “Yeah, but I don’t wick nuts” and dumbshit me assumed she meant walnuts or chestnuts but she clarified went she bent her little self over in half and said, “See? I can’t wick my nuts.”

I have absolutely no response to that.

I picked her up from school today and said, “Whuudup, yo?” as she got in the car. Her 12th grade buddy said, “Oh, that’s where she gets it.” It being what, exactly? “Oh you know, the way she talks. She’s always ‘awesome this’ and ‘wicked that’. It’s pretty grown up talk for a preschooler.” Yeah, just you wait. She has two big brothers. You ain’t see nothing yet.

I grew up poor, and when I say I grew up poor, I don’t mean that I could only afford the knock-off Caboodles; I mean that I wore my brother’s old underwear and my gross annual income was the exact same as my husband’s current net. MONTHLY.

We ate whatever we could get our filthy little hands on, we perfected the art of reusing grocery store paper bags for our trash cans and we wore whatever was given to us.

Usually, we looked like absolute trash.

The problem with that is simply that children reach a certain age when they stop caring at all about what they look like, right in between the “I got dwessed all by myselfes!” phase and before the “I’m getting laid, dammit” phase, and couple that with some significant levels of poverty and the daily dumpster dive for discarded treasures (one man’s trash, yo) (is still just trash) (but is more fun to dig through rotten fruit and old coffee beans for than reading the fucking Bible) (again) and you have some stank-ass children.

My middle brother’s feet smelled exactly like week old vomit, all the time. Not kidding.

One of the little rich-bitches that I lived near growing up, who’s family was probably in the same income bracket as I am now, but whom then seemed like she, as all of those girls seemed to me, was dripping in Hamilton’s, she asked me why I looked so much better than my little brother and sister all the time and the only answer I could come up with was that I cared enough to try.

My children do not share my dedication to personal appearance in the face of great adversity. Perhaps because I stopped caring enough to try once I could afford not to. Or perhaps because fuck if those yoga pants aren’t the most comfortable things ever invented.

My children are lucky enough to not have the slightest inkling as to what the words hunger or need mean, but they are still disgusting little piggies, and it infuriates me. Of course, I am that mother that is all, “when I was a little kid” and “you have no idea how good you have it” and it infuriates them. We are at an impasse.

My oldest son is full-on in the middle of fucking puberty, which makes me feel so old I kind of want to see how much I’d go for at Sotheby’s, and means that he is having all sorts of issues with his T zone. And he knows what a T zone is, which means he’s only a few months years away from knowing what a G spot is and that will officially be the last mythical thing he believes in and my job will be OVER.

I’ve fully lost my train of thought here.

Oh, that’s he’s almost too big to cuddle but is far and away big enough for me to smell, all the time, everywhere I go, even when he’s not there, and it’s wigging me out.

Yesterday, I made him let me groom him. Death. By. Mother. I might as well have grabbed a coat hanger and started ranting about how hard I work and dishrags or something. I brushed his teeth, properly, made him floss AND rinse, and then I *gasp* washed his face. WITH NOXEMA. Sorry if I don’t want to spend the next 6 years looking for my son’s gorgeous face under a blanket of oozey pimples, but I didn’t gain one hundred and five pounds for him to run around looking like semen-filled bubble wrap.

He’s got my skin, which means he’s either very oily or Sarhara dry, so Noxema is just about his only real option. And it smells like yo gramma, which is awesome. So I slathered him up, taught him how to wipe it all off, gave him his very own pint-sized tub of Noxema for his bathroom, and then basked in the glory of his perfectly soft, clear skin for one whole day.

Later that night, I watched him reading his book and I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and rubbed his little cheek, and then told him how beautiful his skin looked. He told me that was the worst thing I’ve ever said to him in his whole life.

And that is music to any mother’s ears.