Joel and I come from a weird amalgamation of backgrounds. His is that of favored son to a Pentecostal preacher and father of nine (eight boys, one girl) who was also a Coast Guard veteran and lower-middle class product from Pittsburgh. In other words, he loved the Lord and cussed like the sailor he used to be, and Joel's mom fit right in that dynamic. Add that to a mid-teen move from blue-collar Northeast big city to Florida Keys fading hippiedom, and you've got a recipe for an identity crisis. Or, if you're Joel, an excuse to take all those worlds and shove them into one inimitable package of self with no apology.

I, on the other hand, am the daughter of a recovering alcoholic from suburban Southern California and a woman raised in rural North Carolina who met in the mountains of East Tennessee. I've lived all over the country, above and below the Mason-Dixon line, and visited a few places outside the U.S. This has definitely affected my standards. Plus, there's the additional fact that in the culture of alcoholism recovery, keeping up appearances and limiting introspection have a serious stigma, since in our dynamic those things can lead to relapse and death. That doesn't mean we don't try, but it does mean that eventually, after pursuing mental, emotional and spiritual health for long enough, we usually give up on that whole "polite fiction" thing and just let it all hang out, and woe to the person who dares be uncomfortable about that because we'll do some pre-emptive self-disclosure strikes just to see you squirm. Also because we have rejection issues.

All that to say, Joel and I don't have the same standards for childish behavior that most people around us do. I'd like to think it's because we've realized the relative nature of expectations based on geography and culture, but really it's because we think it's fine when our kids talk to us the way we talk to each other. Also because it's darned funny to hear a 3-year-old mutter, "Crap," when her shoe falls off.

Nothing drove this home better than the other night, when Teeny woke up just enough to roll over in bed and demand a drink. "No," I told her, "go back to sleep." (Side note: she wasn't thirsty. She just automatically wants us to fetch and carry every time her eyes crack open, which is cute but annoying on nights like this when she wakes at fifteen-minute intervals.) She lay there in silence for a moment, then muttered, "D'ink." "No."

The baby blues flew open, fixed me with an accusatory glare, and the cherub face crumpled. "AWWW, C'MON!" she demanded in exasperation. "Why NOT?!"

I burst into gales of laughter and left it to Joel to explain that she could wait for a while and to go back to sleep.

It's just early days yet. I have no forecast but for worsening in the snark as days go by; after all, Bishop's heading toward the teen years full steam ahead and that age group has made an art form of snide. Wooster's sense of humor tends to take the form of pranks (something she definitely gets from her father's side of the family) but her brother is developing into Mr. Smarty-Pants in his own right.

"Oh, man," I said today at lunch. "I forgot to call Gretchen back."

"Yeah, you need to do that," Joel offered (un)helpfully.

"You probably forgot because you were too busy watching episodes of  Legend of the Seeker," Bishop muttered.

I stared at him for a moment, wondering if he was actually serious, then caught the flash of the dimple in his right cheek. Then I started hooting with laughter. That's my boy. Bring on the 'tween.

I bet you didn't know that I am, in fact, a terrible homemaker. (see: sarcasm) I do keep it mostly clean and always sanitary (a situation helped by a son who is germ-phobic and my own hatred of HTINATSB: Hair That Is Not Attached To Someone's Body), but those little touches that make a house a home largely elude me. Also if I cannot see something it does not exist, and if it's been in the same place for more than 24 hours it Belongs There and I will no longer see it.

Other women seem to "get it," instinctively, by which I mean they actually WANT to read magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and Southern Living and get ideas from them but what I always get from publications like that is a nice case of hives and a follow-up appointment with my therapist, which ends up costing as much as three issues so maybe it's better if I just go for the Entertainment Weekly from the get-go instead of holding off on reading it till I sit in the waiting room. There is nothing more valuable to my family than the ability of the mother figure to discourse knowledgeably about Angelina Jolie's "personal" life. I'm just sacrificing for them, y'all.

And so that totally explains and justifies why I didn't even notice that the contents of a Bag O' Clothes given to me by a friend with better taste were strewn around our bedroom floor except the few that ended up classily draped over the edge of the playpen that my niece sleeps in every weekday for three hours and I don't care what my sister-in-law says, there is no amount of scheduling that would've made my kids sleep like that except medication scheduling, and they frown on that type of thing at the doctor's office so HA! We'll see who gets reported to DCS! And my husband, being the neat-freak that he is (read: possessing normal standards for order in the home), had the nerve to protest their presence after the third day! I mean, doesn't he know it was just Mother's Day yesterday? Doesn't that mean a free pass for the week, or at least an ice cream cone before criticism? Joel should totally read more entertainment magazines, or any magazine at all besides Relevant, because then he'd know this.

After the third time I responded with "Sssh!" to Joel's demand of, "When are you going to put your clothes away?" Bishop found me cleaning in the bathroom and said, "Mommy, I'm going to put this in the trash because Daddy told me to," and he waved a Target bag in my face that contained about half of the new clothes. And even though I knew that Joel had told him to tell me before actually pitching the clothes so that I would tear the bag out of his hands and go storming down the hallway with it into the bedroom where my husband was waiting with a combination of smug self-righteousness and sheer mischief twisting his mouth into a not-unsexy smirk, I was still really mad and threw a bunch of clothes of Joel's that had been in the hamper for five seconds and on the floor for two days before that because, dude, he WALKS OUT OF his pants every night and considers that adequate preparation for bed besides brushing his teeth. And I told Bishop to throw THOSE away, because they were on the floor for as long as mine.

Then Joel started making kung-fu noises and I totally had to school him with the orange belt that I earned thirteen years ago and have done nothing with since because I only took the classes for PE credit at University of Houston, otherwise known as Cougar High, and also because it's in a really bad neighborhood and assault of all kinds were common. It probably looked way scarier now that I weigh a hundred pounds more than I did back then and can scream much louder too since I lost all inhibitions about that during labor with my first child. We ended up Setting A Bad Example for at least fifteen minutes, but then Joel had to go and fish his shirt out of the trash can because I forgot to tell Bishop that I wasn't serious and he very obediently threw it away.

I wrote this post while under the influence of Sudafed. In its legal over-the-counter pill form, not its crystal meth form, but it still seems to have a really bad effect on me. Tomorrow we'll pretend it never happened and you can enjoy making loud, sudden noises next to me and seeing me clutch my head and moan. Or at least scream.

This is more my blogging speed these days:
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