The Perfect Family: Smoke and Mirrors
This weekend will kick-off further pictorial evidence of just how perfect my family is.
Click- Tonight Prince, the ten-year old, will have another baseball game where he is sure to steal home and score an imperative run to keep up the team’s winning streak and their first place position in the league.
Click- Tomorrow my husband will MC the antique car show that the local board of elected officials I sit on is hosting, while I hand out plaques to the runners of the 5k who donated money to the Disaster Victims in the next state.
Click- Sunday will be my husband’s birthday and Mother’s Day.
Click – Wednesday my oldest, my only daughter, will turn twenty-two.
Click- Thursday is Award’s Day at Prince’s elementary school, where he will no doubt again receive the school’s “Medal of Good Conduct Award,” and the coveted “Leadership Award,” since he is clearly the perfect child.
Click- Friday my oldest will graduate from University with her 3rd degree. Did I mention she has been to Congress and the United Nations?
We should probably dress in white shirts and head to the beach and find some grass and have pictures taken in the breeze. I mean, we are so very perfect, aren’t we?
I don’t understand why I haven’t written a book on how to be the perfect mother of perfect children. I should TOTALLY be on the cover of Perfect Magazine and stuff. GEEZ.
Oh wait.
I forgot.
You know the way people don’t want to bring up cancer? Or say the name of a child that has passed away? The way “if we don’t talk about it, it won’t hurt as much.”
Bullshit.
I have another child, “My Dude.” He is nineteen years old. I love him. I don’t call him “My Dude,” because it sounds cool, I do this because I hope one day he will be able to apply for a job and his future employers won’t google him and see the things I have written about his struggles; my shitty job raising him.
He is from me. He is mine. He is just as much as the other two are, and I WILL NOT be taking a family freaking portrait until he is in it. I don’t care if he’s wearing a tin foil hat in that portrait; we will wear matching tin foil hats, dammit.
My Dude was missing for a bit and yesterday on my “humor blog,” I lost my mind. I posted about my mental breakdown. The lovelies from BB2G came flying in and offered to let me vent here.
In addition to a kazillion other people on the internet who sent me virtual hugs and pulled me from the mental pool of snot and self pity and fear, I wanted to personally thank you.
I am not a strong mom. I am just a mom. A screwed-up, flying-by-the-seat-of-my-probably-on backwards-who-knows-thong. Second guessing every move but acting damn sure of myself in front of the shorter people. Arguing with the hired help (The Doctors). Trying to help My Dude battle the demons only he can see. So when you think I am strong, remember I freak out 1 day out of 365.
He and others with mental illness live with it, 24/7, 365.
I cannot imagine that hell.
So to every mother who feels judged, feels like a failure, who has a kid that is overstimulated and screaming and kicking, who is glared at by strangers, sitting in a car line, wanting to give up or just to run away, I need you to know this. Please take it to heart.
When you look out of the window and see that perfect family with the perfect kids and the perfect house; the family that looks like they just stepped out of the magazine; they are just as broken and off-balance as the rest of us. We are all broken beings surviving the best we can. It really is all we can do.
No matter what your battle, please remember you are not alone.
xo,
PEACH OUT