Remember back in the days when you were younger and there was a book or album or pair of acid washed jeans that you just had to have and your parents refused to buy for you? You would argue with them and then flop down on the couch in a state of despair and ask God why? Why did you saddle me with such loser parents who just can’t understand that life will end as you know it if you don’t get said item. You will be thrown into the pits of hell as you become the social pariah amongst all of your friends who all own (because their parents were not losers like yours) what ever item you coveted?

Ya, those were the days.

I had to have a pair of sixty dollar acid wash jeans that made me look like a skinny punk. I thought the world would end if I didn’t get them. I remember the joy of finally saving enough money to walk into that store, purchase those jeans and then strut into class looking like a flat chested, stringy haired geek who was wearing a pair of acid washed jeans the coolest pants in the whole world.

I may have been a geek to everyone else, but that day I felt like the coolest person in the whole class, except for maybe that girl in back who teased her hair really high and wore bright green eye liner. She was REALLY cool.

Lately, those acid washed jeans have morphed into something else. Something more expensive. Something slightly more useful. Something more like this:

I’m not picky, really. I don’t care what make or model it is. I just want a big shiny truck that can run over large animals and keep on going so that I can get wood in the winter and have a vehicle to take my garbage to the dump. I am tired of shoving bags of smelly garbage into the back of my lovely family car, a beautiful 2006 Vibe named Stella.

My husband points out the small fact that we’ve survived for this long with out a truck and we could technically survive forever with out one. That’s because he’s not the one shoving bags of smelly ass waste into his car and then having to hang his head out the window like a facking dog just to breath enough stank-free oxygen to get the garbage to the transfer station and not lose consciousness.

Boo also doesn’t want another vehicle payment on his hands. I get that. I’m a responsible adult. But I’m still allowed to dream. And whine. And needle him incessantly about how if he really loved me, he’d buy me a truck.

(I don’t believe in fighting fair. Heh.)

So when he was home this weekend and he was acting all weird, going to the washroom to make calls on his cell phone, trying to act coy and innocent, I knew something was up. It was confirmed when my sister magically appeared and ‘needed Boo to look at her car.’ But he couldn’t look at her car at our place, where all of his TOOLS are, no, he had to go with her to an unknown place to do this car looking.

A more suspicious gal might be inclined to think there was something rotten in Denver with that scenario. However, I am not a suspicious type of lady. I chose to believe that there would be some vehicle looking going on.

Some truck looking. Heh heh.

I was positively giddy. I was soooo excited. I kept imagining how sparkly and shiny my new truck would be, and what type of pretty name I would christen her with. I even went out to my car and lovingly told Stella that there would always be room in my heart for her, even if I didn’t drive her quite as often.

I phoned my best friend up and gloated to her about what an awesome husband I have. How he makes all my wishes come true. I did a happy dance in my kitchen as my birds and my dog looked at me and wondered what I was smoking.

I kept pacing by the window, watching for my husband to drive up with a fancy truck. Would it be red, or black or silver, I wondered. Suddenly, I could hear the sounds of a truck engine from just beyond the trees. I raced to the window to see my new toy and just about had a freaking heart attack.

Oh ya. I have a truck to call my own now. But you’ll only see me drive it with a pillow case tossed over my head to disguise my true identity.

I raced outside to ask my husband what the fack he was thinking. This was WRONG. On so many levels.

“What the hell, Boo? What is this?” I half whined, half cried.

“It’s sweet eh? And it’s all yours,” he said as he kissed my forehead, obviously mistaking my horror for excitement.

“It’s so ugly!!! And old!!!”

“Well, it’s got some years on it, but it’s not miled out and that rust, it’s just surface rust. Don’t you worry. This here pretty lady runs smooth as a knife cutting through warm butter. I’ve had her inspected and she’s almost as good as the day she was made,” he purred as he caressed her shiny red dashboard.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Then I had a flash of brilliance. “What about our hundred dollar rule? This had to cost more than a hundred bucks. Not much more, but still!” Heh heh. Anything to get rid of this atrocity.

“Well, it was wayyy cheaper than the bedroom furniture you bought behind my back.” Oh shit. Right. The furniture. Damn. There goes that idea. “Don’t you worry. I got a great deal from one of the guys on my crew. He owed me so we made a deal. It was a freaking steal!”

“More like we don’t have to worry about anyone stealing this hunk of junk.” My visions of a shiny new truck were now hitchhiking down the road looking for a new person to partner up with. I tried to swallow my disappointment and look a little happy, just because Boo was so obviously proud of himself.

After a few minutes of showing me the truck’s merits, he told me to hop in and give her a whirl. I was overcome with fear and panic. First off, someone might see me in this piece of shit. Secondly, it looked like it was about to fall apart.

Swallowing the acid taste of fear in my mouth, I climbed in as Boo slid over to the passenger seat. I looked at him and asked for the keys. He handed me a key ring for three keys.

“What are all these keys for?” I stupidly asked.

“Well, one is for the ignition, one is for the door and one is for your tool box in the back.”

Looking over my shoulder I noticed the dented and scratched tool box behind the cab. “Great. Cuz I have so many facking tools,” I muttered.

“Do I have to push in the clutch to start the engine?” I inquired innocently as my hands started to shake slightly.

“Oh no, honey. This is a 1984 model. They didn’t have safety features like that back in those days. Just be careful not to pop the clutch or you’ll lurch forward and smash into what’s in front of you.”

Great. No safety features. I guess I’m lucky there are facking seat belts in the bucket of rust that is now my own.

I learned about low, and bull low and double gas tanks and all sorts of neat things as we tooled around the neighbourhood.

Boo was so thrilled that he was able to get me an ‘acreage truck.’ “It doesn’t have to be pretty to be handy,” he kept repeating in hopes I would start believing his doctrine.

Fat chance.

Next thing I knew, Boo was driving down the driveway in his shiny car, heading back off to work and leaving me with my very own rusted out Tonka Truck to call my own.

There are just no words for how much I love my husband.

Or my ‘NEW‘ truck.

Yesterday, I had a parent-teacher meeting with my darling Fric’s teacher. While she is excelling in her academics and frightening me with her emotional and intellectual wisdom, she has been having problems with bullying.

As in those mean little beyotches at school are making my first born miserable.

My first reaction is to storm into the school, grab them by their scrawny little throats, throw them onto the sticky floor, sit on them and threaten to gob into their faces until they beg for forgiveness and cry for mercy until I let them up and stuff them into their messy little lockers.

However, I think there may be some kinda law about that so I decided to go with the grown up route and discuss the situation with the teachers instead.

If that doesn’t work, I’m putting on my combat boots and heading off to the school to show those little cows whose momma can roar the loudest.

Fric’s teacher is a young thing, with perky boobs and a waist I could probably circle with both of my small feminine hands and she is really pretty. She’s yet to fall into that vicious trap of giving up her youth, beauty and dignity to breeding small humans.

The competitive inner raging bitch in me tells me that I have to present myself in a good light in order to be taken seriously.

This means I can’t just storm into the school demanding for several preteen heads be served to me on a platter looking like a sloppy soccer mom whose gut is bulging out of the top of her pants and has enough grease in her ponytail to squeeze out and slather on the bottom of several baking dishes.

Which is how I normally look. Because why bother grooming oneself if the only persons who see you are the ones you sprung from your loins I am comfortable in my body and how I look.

But common sense and vanity told me the best way to make an impression on her was to NOT look homeless.

I have no qualms going shopping looking like a hillbilly. As long as my face is washed, my hair is combed and there is nothing in my teeth, I’m generally good to go to troll the aisles of the supermarket.

It’s not like my husband is coming home and I was going to get laid so I’d better get purdee fast.

The truth of the matter is I’m vain. I’m a decade older than Miss Perky Teacher. My insecurities can sometimes get the best of me.

I’m normal.

We all know women can be catty bitches. And even if my darling daughter’s teacher didn’t think anything would be amiss with me showing up au naturel, surely some other lady would see me and secretly scorn me.

That or those mean hyenas Fric goes to school with would race home and tell their mean-girl breeding momma’s that Fric’s mom showed up to school today and you should have seen how she looked! She looked so bad. She was wearing yoga pants with camel toe; dirty slippers and she had a giant zit right in the middle of her chin. I’m so going to steal her kid’s lunch money tomorrow and then make her cry about how ugly she and her mom are tomorrow at recess.

Which of course, would defeat the purpose of me going to school in the first place.

So I gussied up and headed in to the school. I mentally envisioned grabbing one of the little cows trouble makers by her hair and dunking her in the boy’s urinal when I bumped into one of the punks upon entering the class.

It was difficult but I managed to resist temptation.

I don’t know how fruitful my meeting with Fric’s teacher was, nor do I know if my daughter’s social situation will improve any time soon. But I do know that by showing up and addressing the problem, at the very least I brought the situation to light.

I want Fric to know her momma’s got her back at all times. Especially when the tough times roll on through town. I just wish there was something more I could do that wouldn’t land my ass into jail.

That’s not exactly the example I want to set for my kids.

As I was driving home from the school, I contemplated everything I had discussed with the teacher and everything Fric had told me. How my daughter is struggling to fit in and still be herself.

It’s something I struggled with growing up and still struggle with. Hence the war paint and fancy clothes to meet with another woman I barely knew. I want my daughter to be comfortable with who she is, how she looks and the person she will become.

I want her to be comfortable enough in her own skin to go grocery shopping with out a stitch of makeup while wearing her most comfortable pants.

I want her to know that it shouldn’t matter how she looks, it should only matter what she does. Even if society disagrees with me.

I want her to know that no matter how she looks she will always be good enough for me.

That is unless she starts dressing like a two bit hooker with goth-inspired makeup. Then we may have to talk.

This is why I’m taking up Sweetney’s challenge and showing you how it really is. What I really look like. And how I most normally look. Because this is it. The real me. The unvarnished truth.

If HBM, MotherBumper, Chocolate, and OTJ plus a whole other schwack of other great ladies can face their morning demons, then darn it, so can I.

Besides, I’m doing it for my daughter. Because she hasn’t been stuffed into a locker enough times, I feel the need to add fuel to the fire.

Heh heh.

The horns kinda itch first thing, so I generally have to scrub them off. Wouldn’t you know, they keep growing back each night. I don’t know what that is about.

It’s a well known fact I enjoy my rubber ducky time. Heh heh.

This is what greets my children, my dog, my husband and my mirror every morning once I’ve chased my demon away.

I’m learning to love her more every day.

I like to keep a clean house. Keep in mind my version of a ‘clean house’ is a loose definition. Very loose. This means that on the weekends I put my slaves kids to work to clean the bathrooms, their rooms, dust the furniture and vacuum while I sit on my computer and blog.

Heh heh.

The problem with my housekeepers is well, they suck. But for the rate they get paid (vast quantities of dried cereal and the odd piece of fresh fruit) I really can’t complain.

So I bite my tongue, tell them they did a half decent job and then take to redoing the mess they made while they are at school. I don’t want to discourage them by telling them cleaning means more than just moving the piles of dirt from one location to another.

On Monday, I rolled up my sleeves and got down to the dirty business of housework. I wouldn’t want my husband to know how we actually live in a pigsty while he’s gone. He’s coming home in a few days. Which means I have to clean like a madwoman before his arrival in order to keep up with this facade so he won’t utter words like ‘get a job’ or ‘earn your keep, woman.’

Which was exactly what I was doing on Monday instead of sitting here tethered to my computer, surfing the net and reading the antics of my beloved fellow bloggers.

You can imagine just how much cleaning I actually got accomplished when I sat down to take a five minute break to check my email and found a lovely note from a good pal of mine, MotherBumper informing me I had won a BLOGGIE.

My laundry is still not done. Oh well. Frac likes going commando anyways.

I was more than a little excited. And grateful. And thrilled. I immediately had to tell my husband who likes to think my blogging is nothing more than escape from my dreary existence as an over-educated, bored, stay at home mom who is stuck in the pits of grieving hell and is too damn lazy to get off her arse and try and put her God given talents to good use. By good use I mean income earning ways.

But the bastard love of my life wasn’t answering his phone. Must be because he was um, working. So I decided to send him an email because surely he would get that message before remembering to check his voicemail.

He of course, was thrilled for me. In a ‘how much money did you win?’ type of way.

Um, none. But the accolades is what counts. And the thrill of victory. The mere knowledge that enough people thought of this little ole blog and voted for me is more than enough to compensate and thrill me to the core.

I’m easy like that.

I imagined how fabulous it would be to tell my kids while wearing a fancy gown, but when I tried on my prom dress from my teenage years I was more than a little horrified to discover my boobs have outgrown it. In an obscene way.

So I had to scrap that idea.

But I couldn’t wait for the kids to get home to share the news with them. I needed something tangible in my hand to drive the point (that they’re mother is the computer geek they feared) home for them.

So I searched the house high and low and decided on one of my son’s sports trophies. Perfect. Now I had a prop to use when I made them listen to my Oscar worthy acceptance speech.

Just know that I’d kiss each and every one of you who voted for me if I didn’t think I wouldn’t get slapped with a restraining order and land in the clink.

I may have sat my children down and used my new found Bloggie as an example of what a person can do if they believe in themselves and post pictures of their breasts on the internet.

My son just wanted me to put his damn trophy down before I accidentally broke it in my fit of excitement.

I may have gone overboard with my shiny gold statue representing all the bloggy love I was feeling for everyone who voted for me.

I had to get down when my daughter threatened to lock me in my room for jumping on the furniture. House rules and all.

I do want to set a responsible example for good behaviour for my offspring. I take that to mean racing around the house with my fake trophy while shouting out the names of every damn blogger I could think of. That and holding my son’s trophy high above my head while he jumped and tried to retrieve it from his freakishly long-armed mother’s grasp, all the while making asking him,

“Who’s your momma now?”

The height of my maturity astounds even me.

Eventually, I calmed down. It was no easy feat. But the kids threatened to hide my mommy juice on me if I didn’t start to behave and that’s a threat I have to take seriously.

But just know, that all of your support and love have helped this momma remember how to laugh and tease her kids. Because it wasn’t too long ago I was wondering if I’d ever be able to see the sunlight again through my clouds of despair.

I really couldn’t have done it without all of you.

After my son finally grabbed his trophy and went to hide under his bed, I had to take to loving on my dog, Nixon, to help me celebrate.

I’m so filled with bloggie love right now. I even love the fact they’ve listed my blog as ‘Attack of the Redneck Monkey’.

They must have seen my monkey toes and how my legs look before I shave them annually.

It’s an easy mistake to make.

Heh. Heh.