I fully realize that the title of this post could potentially cause an uproar. I also fully realize that my blog tends to be a plethora of mooshy-gooshy babble on how much I love being a mother. And, I mean every.single.word.of.it.
But guess what?
If you knew me in real life, you would probably laugh your ass off when reading about all my emotions. 'Cause in real life, I don't share that kind of shit (with anyone other than my children). In fact, my very best friend in the whole wide world told me to keep my mouth shut when shopping for our best friend's wedding dress the other day. Apparently, I am too blunt and occasionally mean. Wah. Wah. The truth comes out....
So, in a weird way, I am embarrassed when people (who know me personally) read my blog. My blog holds my secrets and my truths....my insides. On the outside, I am different. I can be hard. I can be closed off. And I curse....a lot.
On here, I let my emotions seep through my veins and onto the page. I feel naked, exposed, and raw. I let it all hang out.
Now on to the real story.
I was sitting at a table in a Chinese restaurant in the downtown of my hometown with 5 of my best friends from High School. We were the loud, obnoxious ladies drinking Scorpian bowls with far reaching straws and asking the waiters to take our pictures.
We were those women who you absolutely hate unless you are one of them. We laugh too hard, we quote too many movies, we harvest too many inside jokes, we finish too many sentences and we fully admit to being a stone cold pack of weirdos. We wear that title with pride, damnit. And with little puddles of pee in our panties from laughing too hard (oh wait, that may be just me after four children.) Scratch that.
Anyway, I was talking to my friend Ceire about how Matt (my husband) would come pick us up in the minivan with all of my children if we drank too much. Now, before you judge me for being irresponsible, please note that I would have only resorted to this as a last case scenario. In the end, I stopped drinking, sobered up and drove home with a clear head and conscious.
As my friends and I were laughing about what a scene it would be to have Mommy and her best friend stumble into the family minivan, I jokingly stated that Jackson would probably be psyched about the fact that we would undoubtedly be pretty fun to hang out with. You know, we would blast music, sing too loud and throw our inhibitions out the window along with our pride. A kid's dream.
I went on to tell my friends that I am a better Mom when I'm drunk. Of course, this was an exaggerated and buzzed version of the truth. However, one time, after 2 or 3 glasses of wine, Jackson and I went upstairs to my room and did ninja moves off my bed. You know, we were jumping as high as we could and rocketing ourselves off with ninja kicks and “hi-yahhs” He told me I was the Best. Mom. Everrrrr. I typically do not participate in ninja kicks off my bed without wine, but rather, I try to encourage safer and less obtrusive activities.
So, while we were laughing about how gosh darn funny it is that I am a better Mom when I'm drunk, we had a women stumble up to our table. She was completely shit-faced. She was slurring her words and rambling on about how nice it was to see a group of girls together. She thought we were in High School. We assured her that while we were all High School friends, we were all far and above the legal drinking age...hence the Scorpian bowls.
Someone mentioned that I was a mother, which ultimately sparked the moral of this story.
She was a foster parent turned adoptive mother of a 9 year old. How sweet, I thought, until she started to go on and on about how horrible the past year of her life has been and how difficult her daughter was to deal with. She very bluntly said, “she's a huge pain in my ass.”
Just then, my tunnel vision zeroed in on a beautiful little girl who was sitting at the bar alone. Her big green eyes looked too wise for her age, and her chestnut hair looked too snarly to be clean. She sat slouched and resting on one hand, staring over at us with her ears perked and listening. It became absurdly clear that the drunk women speaking to us was her mother, and that she was the "pain in the ass." She looked like an angel to me. She looked like someone who was lost and straining to find comfort. She looked like she needed someone to tell her that she was not a pain in the ass at all.
I cannot believe that I had the audacity to say that I was a better Mom when I was drunk. I cannot believe that I spoke those words when there was a child sitting at a bar, wishing that her mother would stop drinking, and that she could spend her Saturday night at home on the couch, watching movies and eating pizza like any normal 9 year old. I cannot believe that I could not stand up, drag her out and watch that movie with her, sharing blankets and laughter. Instead, I put my drink down, stood up, and as a walked past her with my heart crumbling to pieces on the floor, all I could scrummage up to say was a very simple “goodbye beautiful” and a smile that I can only hope proved to her that someone in the world felt for her. That someone in the world acknowledges that she deserves more than that. She does.
(And for what it's worth, the mooshy-gooshy of it all, the feelings and emotions that this little child pours out of me just thinking about her are worth spewing onto this page, despite how naked it makes me feel. That little girl deserves someone to advocate for her. She deserves someone to feel for her. And who am I to hold that in because I am too afraid to say how I feel?)
To see more beautiful faces of children currently in need of loving homes in the United State, please visit adoptuskids.org.