This is me at age 13. The same age my daughter will be in thirty five days. Holy cannoli. In just over a month my daughter will be a full fledged teenager.

Hold me.

When I was 13 years old, I was fairly certain I didn’t yet have life by the tail but I was also equally certain that one day soon I would. Just as soon as I grew five more inches and my boobs filled out.

This is me, twenty years later at age 33. Today. This very moment. Well, okay, probably not by the time you read this, but you get the point.

As you can see, my boobs filled out. But I never did grow those five inches. I did manage to shoot up an extra two inches but sadly, I never did make the coveted supermodel height I was aspiring to.

I don’t know if I have life by the tail, but I’m still equally certain that one day I will. Even if the only thing I have by the tail is a few dogs, a puppy and more cats than I can shake a stick at.

When I was 13 I didn’t have a clear idea of where I’d be when I grew up but I knew one thing for certain. I was never having children.

There are days when I kick myself for not remembering my 13 year old self more often.

Ahem.

At age 13, there was one thing in life that was sweeter than ice cream. That sweetness was slumber parties. I never had many sleep overs at my own home, always preferring to escape my siblings and my parents by crashing on the floor at friends homes.

There just didn’t seem to be anything better than eating someone else’s food, sleeping under someone else’s roof and watching television on someone else’s television.

I only wish my children felt the same way.

No, instead my darling little imps prefer to herd the neighbourhood children into my yard, my house, my life and destroy the sanctity of peace I like to cultivate.

And because I am that mom, I seem powerless to stop them.

Somehow I’ve morphed into a pushover for puberty parties hosted at my house.

I feel it’s my duty to warn all of you and remind myself what I obviously knew as a 13 year old child: Sleep overs are evil. Unless they’re done at some other schmuck’s house.

Sure your children are cute. They fill your heart with love every time they slather their slimy little kisses on your cheek or wrap their dirty little arms around your neck and whisper how much they love and adore you.

But then they grow up and meet other people’s not so cute children and they befriend them.

That’s when the trouble starts. Because it is then they start insisting on batting their big baby blue eyes at you and begging you to let their friends come over and in a moment of stupidity weakness you cave.

Those cute children you’ve been raising? They are not so cute when they are surrounded by other people’s children. No, they morph into like-minded monsters, preying on your sanity like a pack of hyenas preys on a lone antelope.

Sure they try and butter you up by announcing to their friends that you are the best mom in the world. Sure their friends (upon seeing a breach in your defence) are quick to pat you on the back and whisper words of how you are the coolest mom in the neighbourhood.

It’s all a PLOY people.

A ploy to drive you to distraction so you will cave. These pubescent children have smelled blood and like vampires, will glamour you into believing what they say is the truth; all so you will drive to the grocery store and spend a small fortune on food that isn’t fit for human consumption.

While they are cramming fists full of chips and cheetos and swigging down gallons of orange pop they will say cute things to amuse you. Don’t listen. Don’t get charmed into thinking these people, children of other peoples, are good.

They’re harbingers of evil.

Soon it will be dark and like the creatures of the night they will rise just as you are yawning and dreaming of pillows and down comforters. They will bring your children over to the dark side as you helplessly watch your children transform before your very eyes.

Filled with empty calories and the adrenalin of happiness they will bounce off your walls, your furniture, your sanity until you find yourself pleading with them for a single moment of silence.

You will do the unthinkable and agree to let them watch inappropriate movies all in a desperate bid to get them to quiet down and sit still. Every parenting skill you have accumulated and stock piled will be thrown aside as you attempt to conquer these savages you once recognized as flesh of your flesh.

Then, when you think the situation is firmly in hand and under control, you will turn your back on the pack, say your good nights and retire to the peaceful sanctity of your room to await for slumber to erase the pain of the night and for dawn to return and restore your parental powers once again.

You’ll be lulled asleep by the soft murmurs of their whispers, content with the knowledge that once again you put your children’s happiness before your own and created yet another childhood memory to their collection.

That’s what they want.

They wait for that very moment. And once they are assured you have drifted off to the land of Nod, they will pounce.

You will be woken up to the shrill sounds of squeals and laughter as these creatures of darkness run around your lawn at two in the morning playing a rousing game of tag. You will be forced to rise from the warmth of your own bed and shrug into a cold robe and stand on a cold damp deck and bellow at them to get their arses back into bed before someone gets hurt.

They will file in with angelic faces and their false apologies and your heart will feel pangs of guilt for harshing their buzz but they will once more settle in for the night so that you can  return to your now chilly bed and pray for peace once more.

And just as you nod off you will awake to the sounds of splashing and whispered laughter and the quiet worried hushes of a preteen child you thought you knew so well as she announces, “Shhh. You’ll wake up Mom!”

No good ever comes from that sentence.

Once again you will find yourself out in the dark of the night, on a dew filled deck, only this time sleep has taken with it your sanity and your good sense and you will find yourself telling the children swimming out in the pool at three am to knock it off and pipe down.

You are no longer concerned about safety. You no longer care if their growing bodies get the rest they need to stay strong and healthy.

These imps of pop culture and sugar have sapped your strength and you will find yourself grudgingly climbing back into bed for the third time that night only to find yourself wide awake as you listen to the splashing and laughter and cries of “Marco!” “Polo!”

Suddenly quiet will fall  and you will breathe a sigh of relief as you falsly convince yourself the unending energy of these creatures has finally tapped out.

It’s about then, that very moment, you will hear the snickers as these children you no longer recognize stand beneath your bedroom window and make ghost sounds to try to scare you.

“Whooooo. I am a verrrry scarrrrry ghoooost out toooo geet your sooooouul.”

Giggle.

“Booooooo.”

Giggle.

This will continue until you are forced to threaten to beat them senseless with  a pillow if they don’t leave you alone and let you sleep.

At this point, they are so out of control they can’t even help themselves from the evil that is within them.

Eventually sleep will claim you, although it will be fitful and worrisome. You will be plagued by nightmares of waking up to find your child standing above you holding an axe as their friends chant softly “Do it, do it, do it” behind them.

Finally dawn will break and you will rise with optimism fresh in your heart. You survived, you think. Just a few more hours and soon your house will be yours once more.

It’s then that these children go in for the kill, reaching for your soft underbelly of weakness and drive the knife of preteen power deep within you.

You will wake to find they will have robbed your pantry, emptied your cupboards and left them barren. And as they gleefully consume the last remains of all your food you will stand in front of the refrigerator and weep silently as you try to pour yourself a glass of juice only to find they have drained the jug down to the last drop and put the empty container back in the fridge.

You’ll hear soft whimpers of surrender coming from your lips as you give up and hand over any semblance of dignity and sanity to the pack of pubescent people standing around you.

Tell yourself this is the price you must pay for once being a 13 year old who tormented parents around the neighbourhood.

Remember this people:

Packs of preteens should be avoided at all costs.

Sleep overs are EVIL.

Unless they are at someone else’s house.

Words to live by.

Consider yourself duly warned.

I obviously knew this as a 13 year old child. Which is why I seldom inflicted this torture on my own parents. Because I was a good child.

Apparently the apples have fallen far from this tree and my children just aren’t as smart as I was when I was their age.

Dammit.

His name was Stephen.

He was tall, with long white hair pulled into a pony tail that dipped well into his middle back. I liked him immediately because he wore a black cowboy hat.

My father always wears a black cowboy hat. The similarity made me smile.

He smiled at me and shook my hand, his calloused fingers wrapping around my own. The corner of his watery blue eyes crinkled with humour and as I made eye contact for the first time with him I was surprised to see the depth of sadness and knowledge hidden behind his wire framed glasses.

We sat that night, together, around a circular patio table under neath a warm British Columbia sky. We were united by our mutual love for her, and as we spoke softly as the others came and went we discovered we had far more in common than just the lady who had brought us together.

He was soft spoken next to my brashness and far more reserved than I’ll ever manage to be in my life. I watched him as he gently interacted with his grandchildren and I laughed as he took little J under his wing and tried to teach him to blow stones like one does a fuzzy dandelion puff.

Later that night the two of us found ourselves alone underneath the patio umbrella, while the rain drizzled down around us. The night air was deafening with the quiet swallowing us.

He asked me about my life and how I found his daughter. He was genuinely interested in how an Albertan prairie girl found her way into the very core of his family. His eyes clouded with pain as he asked about my angel son and his paternal instincts flared as he listened to the violent road my new son has traveled in his short life.

We sat quietly for a moment, as he digested the facts of my life, my history before he broke into a smile and told me some of his favorite moments as a father to her and her sister. He chuckled as he told me personal memories and smiled like a proud father when he told me that his grand daughter was a carbon copy of her mother.

The night drew to a close as the rain started pounding around us and together we gathered up all the chairs to try and keep them dry. As we headed into the house to turn in for the night he clasped my hand once more and told me to sleep well.

The next morning  he watched his family and the new generation his children have created and laughed as we all swapped stories and jokes over breakfast. Pictures were taken and memories shared and soon my time with this family,  this family who had welcomed me as one of their own, was ending.

As I stood to leave and find my way back to my own family, with love in my heart and promise to self to one day be able to have moments like this with my own family, he approached me and wrapped his arms around me.

He thanked me. For sharing my story with him, for listening to him as he told me his. He thanked me for being kind to his family and for loving his daughter so. And then he thanked me for something no one else ever had before: He thanked me for simply being me.

I hugged him hard and tears welled up at the corner of my eyes and for a heartbeat I wished he could have been my father.

And then I left.

And now he is gone.

His name was Stephen.

Thank you for sharing your father with me Catherine.

You will be greatly missed Stephen. God Speed.

*****If you are inclined to leave your condolences for Her Bad Mother‘s loss in my comment section, I will be sure the family and Cat receives them all.*****

I failed a neurological exam. The only other test I have ever failed was a grade eight science test that I had completely forgotten about and neglected to study for. I blame the cute boy Sascha for this. I was too busy making googoo eyes at him and plotting ways to have him fall in love with me to be interested in volcanos, tectonic plates and the make up of the earth’s strata.

(Funny, something must have been absorbed cuz I remember all that shit now. Harumph.)

However failing a neurological exam has a different set of consequences other than lowering my grade point average and pissing my parents off. Failing a neurological exam means I have just earned myself a free trip to the inside of a neurosurgeon’s office, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars.

I blame my nephew the Worm for this. Back in early February I was trying to wrestle the three year old beastie into his winter jacket and push him out of my house. He didn’t want to leave. (Really, why would he? I AM the coolest aunt on the planet.) As I was bent over trying to shove rubber limbs into fabric noodles something in my lower back went BOOM.

For a couple of weeks I hobbled around and hunched over moaning, but I didn’t give my back much thought. I mean, I’m 33. I’m not as young as I once was. This back has been flat on a mattress more times than a human can count and is bound to have a little wear and tear.

Then one morning towards the end of February, just after we brought Jumby home, I was carrying Nixon, the World’s Greatest Dog, EVAR, out to go potty. The snow was four feet deep and my pansy-arsed dog was acting like a princess. I didn’t want him shatting in my house so I put my slippers on and carried my lovable mongrel outside.

Slippers, snow and ice are not the greatest combination when carrying a slightly overweight Boston Terrier princess. My feet went out from under me like I was the star in some bad cartoon and the only thing I thought of as I was heading south with an alarming velocity was “Protect the Dog!”

Nixon came out unscathed but apparently my spine did not. Two months of agony while laying on my couch moaning and several failed neurological exams was the price I paid for my princess pooch to squat outside in the snow.

The things I do for the ones I love.

Official diagnosis? I have an owie that apparently refuses to heal on it’s own.

Which is how I failed several neurological exam involving pointy little needles and disturbing looks from physicians and found myself face to face with a man who carves on brains all day long.

Good times.

After the brainy brain doctor put me through the paces (the right side of my body totally flipped him the bird as my left side totally performed like an overachiever and passed with flying colours) he sat me down to discuss my health options.

“Well Tanis, given your age, your medical history and the fact you have a lazy arsed dog and a quadriplegic son to take care of, my only recommendation is for immediate back surgery.”

Blink, blink. (Me.)

“Um, aren’t you supposed to say that? I mean, you are a surgeon. Instead of getting steak knives at Christmas, people give you scalpels. Isn’t there any other way to fix my back that doesn’t involve filleting me like a fish?”

Blink, blink. (Him.)

“Unless you are on a first name basis with your maker and can arm twist Him into performing a healing miracle for you, I think we’ve exhausted all other possibilities. Which is why you are here. With me.” He grinned like Hannibal Lecter did when thinking of Chianti and fava beans.

Blink, blink. (Me.)

“I see. What about drug therapy? Or physical therapy? Traction? Yoga? Getting spanked by a herd of wild monkeys?”

Blink, blink. (Him.)

“Hmm.” He scratched his head with a pen he grabbed from the confines of his pocket protector. “Narcotics won’t heal the injury. They’ll just turn you into a drooling pill addict and you’ll find yourself either in rehab with a bad back or in a dark alley turning tricks with a bad back trying to earn enough money to buy black market pills. Physical therapy has proven ineffective in healing your back and by the looks of this CT scan have possibly aggravated your condition. Yoga is for pussies and while I’d love to video and YouTube you be spanked by wild monkeys, I’m thinking I’d get more benefit from that treatment than you would.”

Blink, blink. (Me.)

“I see.” Gotta love a doctor who is a straight shooter. “But I have a tramp stamp! A memorial tattoo for my dead son.”

“Ya, that’s unfortunate. It’s a pretty tattoo. It won’t be after the surgery.”

“You can’t avoid cutting it? Go in from my abdomen or just cut besides the tattoo?” I could have been whining at this point but I’ll never tell.

“Nope. Not with the severity and location of your injury. I’d do my best to make the incision as small as possible but it’ll still be ugly.” He said this in a bored tone like it’s no big deal. I attribute this to the fact he wasn’t the one who had the dead kid or the one who spent four hours of his life hunched over a bench while a tattoo artist used a gun full of needles to permanently scratch my skin into something pretty.

“Crap. Well, if that’s the worst thing about the surgery, I suppose I can live with that.”

“Nah, that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is you’ll need at least six weeks to recover and during that time you can’t lift anything heavier than 10 pounds.”

“My dog is heavier than ten pounds! My disabled son who completely relies on me for mobility weighs more than ten pounds!”

“And no jarring activities during that time, including sex.”

“Why don’t you just shoot me? It’s bound to be less painful.”

“Probably. But I’ll get in less trouble and make more money if I just slice you open and fix you.”

“Well when you are in there, can you like, make me bionic? Give me super powers or anything?”

“No.”

“Make me more bendy? I pride myself on being bendy you know. Dudes dig a bendy chick.”

“No. In fact, your Gumby-like qualities may be somewhat diminished for at least a while.”

“But at least I won’t be in any more pain, right? And this will fix me and I’ll never be stooped over like a withered old hag and I’ll get the feeling back in my right leg and foot again, right?” I asked, looking for the bright side while still trying to adjust to the fact my tattoo will be annihilated and my dreams of being the Super Bendy Bionic girl were evaporating like steam in the shower.

“You’ll be in some pain during the recovery period, but nothing like when you injured yourself originally. I can’t guarantee this will completely fix or prevent any future back injuries and with the amount of nerve damage already done there is no way I can predict if you will ever regain feeling in your foot after the surgery.”

Blink, blink. (Me.)

“I see. So what you are telling me is not only will you wreck my tattoo, steal my bendiness and render me useless to my family for a minimum of six weeks; I won’t be new and improved but may in fact still remain broken with no guarantees of any sort of success.”

Blink, blink. (Him.)

“Well, I suppose, yes.”

“Then why in the world would I agree to have surgery on my back?”

“Well, because of the location of the injury and the nerves involved, if you don’t have the surgery there is no guarantee that you won’t wake up tomorrow and start involuntarily defecating.”

Blink, blink. (Me.)

“Hmm. I always wanted to be known for something but somehow spontaneous shitting was never on my list.”

“Ya. Plus the diapers you’d have to wear would make your arse look really big,” he offered.

“You know, somehow this back surgery really doesn’t seem like a bad thing after all.”

“I knew you’d see things my way sooner or later,” he grinned.

And that is what happens when you fail a neurological exam. They don’t rescind your brain; they just promise you a lifetime of shuffling, stooping and impractical pooping.

Shiit.

***Post Edit***

I should have added or clarified this appointment WAS my second opinion. Which confirmed the first opinion. My back is fudged in an unpleasant manner.

I’ve been to the bone crunchers (after putting aside my personal opinions about how they are nothing but a bunch of phony wannabe doctors) and spent months letting them twist and contort me. They didn’t heal me but they did drain my bank account.

I have also visited an accupuncturist, a massage therapist and a voodoo doctor who boiled a chicken and played a Pantera record backwards while blowing wafts of marijuana in my face.

Nada.

So after exhausting all of my options it’s time to face the piper. I am however, waiting to have a  MRI done to determine how quickly I may start involuntary crapping before I get naked and lay on a table for a scalpel wielding doctor to play with me.

I truly appreciate all your concern and well wishes.

Smooches.