I’ve always wanted to fly. Not in an airplane, although I admit, I find great joy riding through the skies while peering through the clouds. It’s likely as close to heaven as this heathen will ever get.

I always wanted wings. The freedom of birds. The ability to soar through the air and feel the wind in my hair.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t have wings. I do, however, have a beak as sharp and pointy as any birds, but my nose can’t carry my arse through the sky.

My son Jumby, is like his momma. He wants to be able to fly.

He can’t walk. At all. He can’t crawl and instead half slithers, half rolls to get where he wants to be. He can barely sit. If you place him on his bum to sit he immediately topples over. He doesn’t have the core strength to sit up right. He’s mastered squatting on his knees but only because he’s stubborn. Even then, a cat’s sneeze can quickly tumble him from his position.

The violence inflicted on Jumby in his young age robbed his body of any independence he hoped to one day achieve. A man’s anger stole everything from my son, leaving him trapped in a broken, blind, deaf body and left his brain to wither, cementing him to an intellect of a baby forever.

What that violence didn’t manage to steal however, was Jumby’s soul. Somewhere in the twisted rubble of what is left of the boy I call my son, is a willful child who is tired of seeing life from lying on the floor.

This boy wants his freedom. He wants to fly.

You can see it in his eyes when he’s strapped into his wheelchair and we push him as fast as we can in the grocery store aisles, yelling at people to get out of the way as we run. His face lights up when his siblings bounce him on the trampoline and his shrieks of laughter ring in our ears when his dad tosses him high into the sky.

My son wishes he has wings.

I wish he did too.

A swingset really can cure the evils of life. So says Jumby.

I like to think my kids are good kids. I’ve raised them right, so far. For the most part, they are respectful, well mannered and good-natured. Of course, the moment I ask them to clean their bedrooms or change their brother’s diaper they morph into three-horned demon children, but from all the parenting manuals I haven’t read, I expect this is somewhat normal.

The problem with my children is they insist on surrounding themselves with other children. Other people’s children. Children I have had no control or effect on how they were raised.

Life would be much easier if my children cloistered themselves within the hallowed halls of our own home and amused themselves with sticks and rocks. I’ve tried to convince them this is the best solution to survive these teenaged years but my children thus far are not convinced.

Because my children insist on being happy little social butterflies (like their father), flitting from one childhood friend to the next instead of being house-bound curmudgeons (like their mother), I seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time with the offspring of others.

For the most part, I enjoy this. Or rather, I used to. You see, Fric and Frac’s friends and cousins used to adore me. Idolize me, you could even say. I was the cool parent, the hip young mom who had no problem getting down in the dirt to wrestle when needed and happily served ice cream for dinner.

Since I haven’t changed, (I’m still cool and hip, and darnit, I feel young), it’s gotta be the kids who are mutating.

The problem is these children, like my children, have hit puberty. Which means my children are surrounding themselves with a pack of feral, pimply, attitude-laden kids which society insists I’m not allowed to beat.

This is becoming problematic.

It’s not so much Frac’s friends, as they tend to be boys and boys, no matter the age, seem to be charmed by long blonde hair and big boobs. Frac’s friends for the most part are good boys with laid-back attitudes who like to play outside and set things on fire shoot things wrestle in the dirt. These days, I find Frac’s friends are still scared to look me in the eyes, mostly because I just caught them staring at my boobs.

If anything, Frac’s friends are the only things keeping my self-esteem somewhat afloat as I hit my mid-thirties.

(Let’s not analyze that last sentence too deeply shall we?)

But the girls my daughter, Fric, surrounds herself with are entirely different beasties now that they have all hit puberty and have morphed into a pack of menacing she-devils, intent on bringing my daughter down with them into their pits of pubescent hell. Meanwhile, my loving, snarkless daughter is contemplating giving me the finger and flinging herself down into the mud pits just to spite me.

Don’t get me wrong; these teenaged girls are good girls. (I think.) It’s hard to tell what with them being coated in enough war paint to make a two-bit hooker jealous and hiding their surly expressions behind hair that constantly hangs in their faces.

These girls are smart, athletic and they all have bright futures in front of them if they’d look up from their cell phones long enough to see it.

And I’m sure they are wonderful children when they are under the watchful eyes of their parents. Just as I’m sure my daughter is a perfect angel no matter where she is.

(Parental Delusions for the win!)

But the thing is, when I see these kids, they aren’t around their parents. And they can be obnoxious, unpleasant and all around pains in the asses.

(For the record, I was never like that. Ask my mom. I was the perfect child. Dutiful, helpful, polite and I only ever spoke when spoken to. Heck, when I walked into a room, a ray of sunshine followed me wherever I went.)

Okay, okay, I had a smart mouth and a bad attitude at that age as well. But I like to think I at least hid my cheekiness a bit better from the adults around me and pretended to be respectful while thinking the grown ups around me were just a bunch of meatheads.

(If my mother could blog she’d likely tell you I was no better than the she-wolves my daughter hangs out with.)

Parenting a teenaged girl, for the most part by myself since Boo is away at work, is hard enough without having to deal with the combined snottiness of other people’s children. These kids are smart. They know there is strength in numbers. They sense my weakness and my daughter has joined forces in driving me crazy.

The thing is, I can rectify my daughter’s behaviour. I can send her to her room, take away her electronics, ground her till she’s thirty or threaten to cut off her toilet paper supply.

But for some reason, other people won’t let me have that same control over their children. They seem to think they are capable parents themselves and don’t want my obnoxious interference thoughtful help.

Which is starting to stifle my reputation as the cool mom to be around because I’m transforming into a cranky bag who wants nothing to do with any teenaged girl other than the one the government insists I’m legally required to raise.

When a 14 year old rolls her eyes and talks to me like I’m stupid, I can’t help myself. My first impulse isn’t to ignore the bad behaviour. It’s to call her out on the carpet. Or better yet, beat her. Preferably with a very large stick.

When a 14 year old dismisses me, talks down to me or tries to ignore me even though I’m standing directly in front of her, I kinda lose my mind. Seriously, it starts to seep out my ears.

Puberty stole the sweetness right out from these girls and replaced it with something rancid. And it’s contagious, because the more my daughter is around these type of girls, the more she becomes like them.

I’m spending a lot of time re-rolling my daughter in sugar and quite frankly, who has time for that?

I’m trying to cut these girls a break, my daughter included, because I’m not hard-hearted. I remember what it was like to be that age and to be so very misunderstood. I don’t want to be the enemy here.

But is it too much to ask for these girls to put their damn cell phones away for one minute when trying to have a conversation with them? Am I asking too much to see their eyes when I’m talking with them? I can live with the Tammy Faye make up jobs, and I’ll happily accept the bad dye jobs and insane hairstyles these young whippersnappers are sporting nowadays. I just want to see their faces.

You know, to better see them roll their eyes at me.

I knew this parenting gig would take a turn for the worse eventually. It couldn’t all be popsicles and belly laughs forever. I understood parenting teens would test my maternal skills and give me a run for my money.

I knew my kids would test boundaries and stretch to reach new limitations.

But I never anticipated how strong my desire would be to staple someone else’s kid’s eyelids shut as they drove me batty.

I don’t often use my blog as a drum skin to bang. This is my space to entertain myself and share my life with the people who choose to read it. But today, I’m picking up my drumsticks and banging away, hoping one person will hear my words and choose their own more carefully the next time they speak.

I’ve written before how using the word retarded affects me. I’m tired of hearing people use the word retarded as their go-to word for stupid or lame* defective and I’m even more annoyed with the people who don’t understand why I take offence to it’s usage.

The word retarded, when used in our modern lexicon doesn’t just mean slow any more. The r-word has become a catch-all word for society to use when frustrated, annoyed or ignorant. It’s spawned a family of new words: the celebutard, the e-tard, and the ever useful, fuck-tard. The word and it’s growing plethora of cousins is all over the internet, filtering into our daily lexicon.

It’s not okay.

Like I tell my kids, words have power. Yes, I understand the meanings of words flux and change over the course of time, like currency in modern life. But this should mean that our standards of morality and the words we use to reflect that morality must be constantly examined and reapplied as time passes. It shouldn’t mean that our standards be abandoned, bankrupted like an American bank in the Great Depression.

When you drop the ‘tard bomb into casual conversation, you are demeaning disabled people and reinforcing the stereotype that mental disabilities are bad and that people who suffer these disabilities are lesser; to be excluded and ignored because they don’t know any better. Heck, it’s not like they even know what the word means right? Who are you hurting?

You are hurting me. You are hurting my kids. You are hurting everyone who loves someone who has been labeled a retard due to how they look, how they speak or how they learn.

It’s not okay to go on twitter and announce that your computer is retarded. Did you mean your computer’s operating system is running slow? You might have meant to convey that your laptop is a piece of shit that doesn’t work and you desperately covet a new one, but instead you just conveyed your ignorance and your lack of respect for the most marginalized, disparaged group of people in the world.

That pisses me off.

This is a word that carries with it a history of social isolation and exlusion. It’s use is a reminder of the culture of neglect people with disabilities are forced to endure every day. By using it, you are reinforcing the idea that handicapped, mentally disabled, people are bad, lesser, sub-human.

It only takes a second for a person to call something retarded, but for my children, for me, it will take a life time to erase the negative connotations associated with the word. In the instance you insert the r-word into your casual conversation, I’m instantly transported to the moment in time I overheard a complete stranger refer to my beautiful child as a retard, or the time my children came home in tears because someone chased them around the playground teasing them about having a retarded brother.

You are reminding me of the endless hours of sitting in a hospital beside my child, worrying for his future, wondering what is going to happen to him when I’m too old or weak to take care of him myself. You are reminding me of all the times I’ve fought to have him included on field trips and of all the times I’ve spent on hold with some bureaucrat trying to find funding to pay for a necessary service. You are reminding me of the friends I’ve lost because they are made uncomfortable by having my child around them.

When you use that r-word, or any of it’s colourful and less charming derivatives, you are hurting someone. You are discriminating against a people who can’t stand up for themselves and quite frankly, you are pissing me off.

I don’t need a reminder of the dismissive attitude in our society towards my child. I live it every damn day. Every time a child hides in fear behind their mother’s leg because they are scared of the drooling kid in a wheelchair. Every time a grown adult refuses to make eye contact with me or my son. Every time I hear someone I know tell me it’s not a big deal to use the r-word after I chastise them for doing just that.

It is a big deal.

By using that word, whether YOU realize it or not, you are minimizing the struggles of disabled people and their families. You are demeaning, mocking and disrespecting a society of people who have been forced to endure more hardship and struggles than most, simply by nature of their birth.

Oh, and that argument that I’m being to over-sensitive? Too politically correct? Ask yourself how you would feel if you were forced to wear that sign pinned to your back side for others to try and kick.

You can argue that you are taking the word retard back, owning it, but you aren’t. Thirty years plus of having the word retard being used in a derogatory manner isn’t going to be erased. The stereotype isn’t just based on society’s careless use of this word, it resides in society’s treatment of and attitude towards these special people.

There is no defending the use of the r-word in my world. Defending it’s use is not defending freedom of speech, and heck I’d fall on the sword to defend that right, but instead it is the defence of bullies.

That is why you shouldn’t use the r-word anymore.

Because ultimately, no one likes a bully.

Go here to read Jumby’s story. And remember his face next time you want to drop the r-bomb.

*Post edit: My use of the word lame was meant to denote feeble or defective but I forgot society also attributes that word as a disparagement to handicapped and disabled. I’m not perfect either. But I’m willing to learn and try harder. For my kids.