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.

So my boys started a blog.

It’s not like I didn’t see it coming. I mean, I’ve had this thing for half of their lives. Of course, they didn’t know I had it until their father found out, which was more like 1/4 of their lives ago, but once they DID know, they were all over it.

At first, they didn’t quite understand what it was. And then they realized it was them, and they wanted to read it All. The. Time. And then they got bored of it, and then it became this big, running joke. “Oh, 2of3, you wish you didn’t do that! Mom is totally going to put it on her blog!” And then it became a competition. “Mom, put this on your blog! 3of3 was on there 5 times this month but you haven’t talked about me at all!”

And now they’re getting a little too old to e-cuddle and they really want to be on Facebook and I’ll let them do many various age-completely-inappropriate things but Facebook ain’t nevah gonna be one of them, so they did the one thing every child does best.

They did like I do.

They started a blog.

They had a co-conspirator some help. They have this little friend online who they got to meet in real life a few months ago and when that happened, grand and very expensive birthday parties were planned and blogs were forged out of marshmallow and flame. Or dessert was, either way.

The birthday party? Fat chance, kids.  The blog, however? Yeah, that just happened.

If you were, say, an old Denver friend or a relative, and you were to call me, we’d probably catch up on my kids.  You’d ask about 3of3 and I’d say that she was absolutely perfectly lovely and a raging lunatic.  You’d inquire about 2of3 and I’d tell you that he is just as funny and charming as ever and a compulsive liar bordering on sociopath.  We’d get to 1of3 eventually and all I’d really be able to say is that he wears one shoe size smaller than I do and that he’s a complete jerk.

You’d probably say something like, “Way harsh, Tai.”

But of COURSE he’s a complete jerk.  He’s 11 and has inhaled steroids every day for the better part of 6 years now.  Puberty has sucker-punched that boy, and hard.  The only thing more disheartening about him right now than his disposition is his aroma.

The boy makes Axe body spray smell like heaven.  And Axe deodorant.  And Axe shampoo.  And whatever Axe they come out with next.  Lesser of two evils, yo.

The thing is, he’s just not that into me anymore.  I am no longer a deity; I am nothing more than a boss whom he occasionally has to hug.  He’ll still throw me a sideways glance and a coy smile if he sees me in his school, but he’ll never approach me.  At home he spends most of his days trying to dodge me in new and creative ways.

Just because you turn all the lights off and totally bury yourself under a throw blanket, that doesn’t mean I suddenly can’t hear the Super Mario Brother’s theme on the DS from under there, you dumb ostrich.

I’ve noticed a sharp and speedy decline in both the length and quality of our conversations as of late.  Where he used to talk my ears off over dinner, now he powers down his veggie burger* and runs out the front door before I can catch him. Now I know where the sudden interest in Marathon training has come from.

We don’t giggle on our drive into school anymore; I giggle and he curls himself into a tight, fetal ball of over-it and prays for a quick death or the end of the torturous drive to school.  Which takes 42.36 seconds.  Drama Queen.

He still loves me, of this I have no doubt, but the boy has moved on.  He’s matured.  He thinks that I am a moron.

He told me one day that he wished I’d stop wearing all that Eye Shallow (liner).  Why?  Because he thinks it makes me look dumb.  His friend came to the door three nights about at 7:45 to ask if he could go outside to Ripstick and when I said no, he looked me dead in the eye and screamed, “Oh, COME ON.”  And yes, I let him live, thankyouverymuch.

I actually think this whole thing is quite endearing and almost funny.  See, I wasn’t allowed to so much as say Huh? to my mother without loosing my front teeth and so the fact that I’ve cranked out this man who isn’t afraid to tell me what he thinks, who isn’t afraid to be a normal teenager, well….I’m feeling pretty damn good about that whole situation.  I think I win, you know?

And I am going to keep repeating that to myself when the kid comes up to me and says, “Why are you dressed like THAT?” and I say, “What?” and he says, with a little finger drawing an air circle in front of me, “That.  That thing you’re wearing” and I say, “You mean this dress?” and he says, “Yeah, that” and I say jokingly, “You’re mom’s a girl, dude.  Did you forget that or something?” and he, dead serious, says, “Well, yeah” and walks away.

I’m a better parent than my mother.  I’m a better parent than my mother.  I’m a better parent than my mother.  But I’m starting to see where she got the idea to kill us all came from.  Bygones.

*That is a whole other story entirely.