I have been blogging for what seems like forever in the world of online blogging. Four years. My blog, she is an old and crippled thing already. I can no longer consider myself a newbie at this online writing gig.

But for as long as I’ve been blogging, I’ve been parenting longer. For almost thirteen years now. I’ve got four kids and a schwack of parenting experience under my belt.

Because of this, I rarely jump on any of the band wagon issues that continually make the rounds in the mommy blogosphere. It all seems  old hat to me and I never feel like I have anything new or fresh or interesting to add to the conversation. Let the other’s speak for me because there is always someone out there who can say it better than I can.

But this latest mommy blog fever about how declaring oneself a bad mother is nothing but a trend, a social media ploy to sell books or get traffic has quite frankly incited my ire and fury, similar to when a 14 year old boy bullies my 12 year old daughter and bloodies her nose.

It pisses me off enough to make me want to jump on my soap box and break out my bullhorn.

So I am adding my voice to the discussion and breaking my own blog ethics by chiming in.

Where’s Black Hockey Jesus to compose a musical for bad mothering when you need him?

It’s time for a little redneck edumacation if you will.

Oh ya, I’m about to get all sanctimommy-ish and up in yer grill. Now would be the time to click the big red X if you’re not up for a little cussing.

You see, I have had a unique experience that most parents never have had the pleasure of enduring.  For the last three plus years I have had my parenting and every parental decision I have ever made, put under a microscope to be dissected and analyzed by a plethora of ‘child raising experts.’

I know first hand just how damaging the social media construct of what a GOOD mother is and the consequences of bucking that trend by being an atypical mother, someone who is unabashedly ‘BAD’.

And I was being bad on my blog and real life before it became the hottest media trend. I was country when country wasn’t cool. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

It started the night Shalebug died and having to spending the next three months facing the firing squad with various Albertan coroners over why my son mysteriously and suddenly died and what did I do to cause it? Those f*ckers were determined to find neglectful or inept parenting as cause of death. In yer face you over-educated schmucks! (Ahem. I’m not bitter. Really. Okay, fack yes I am bitter still. It was a nightmare. Almost worse than having your kid drop dead on you in the first place.)

There is nothing quite like the rigorous investigation of an untimely death by authorities who have the power not only to take away your remaining children but to sentence you to be somebody’s bitch at the local prison while fighting over a bar of soap to strip down your parental beliefs and self-examine your definition of what ‘good’ parenting really is.

Having survived that festive period of time with more scars on me than a man sentenced to 20 lashes for stealing a loaf of bread, I figured I would publicly document my ‘bad parenting’ for the world to see and hence the birth of this blog.

Cuz what’s more fun than writing from the heart to document my experiences with my children and then to be indirectly criticized for “endlessly tapping the vein of faux self deprecation for shock value or cheap laughs or sympathy.”

For the record, there is nothing faux about my self deprecation. Ask my therapist.

Then, as if having my community, my family and myself examine and doubt my parenting skills wasn’t enough fun, my husband and I decided to jump through hoops of fire in a bid to adopt. Not only was my parenting and very inner core examined through this process but again last summer  when I was falsely accused of being a baby beater.

For more years than I care to admit, I have had to do nothing but jump through hoops to prove I am not a ‘bad’ mother.

My kids have been questioned, analyzed and dissected and I’ve answered more personality diagnosis multiple choice questions than a crazy person tossed in the loony bin.

A child psychologist invaded my home and sat on my furniture to observe the effect of my parenting on my children’s precious psyches.

I’ve sat at a table of six judgmental professionals and defended my parenting style and choices over and over again.

They didn’t want to, (especially after they discovered my blog) but they HAD to stamp me a ‘good mom’ because according to them, and I quote, “despite Tanis’s unique parenting style, her children are well-adjusted, emotionally happy and highly functional children.”

DESPITE. Not ‘because of’, but despite my parenting. God I love parenting professionals.

What I have learned through all of this and ultimately, my point to this long winded diatribe, is that nothing matters as long as your children turn out to be happy, thriving, functional and well-adjusted adults. (‘Cept Jumby. He may not be functional in the tradional sense of the world but he’ll steal your heart with his smile and his amazingly well-adjusted personality.)

I choose to embrace ‘bad‘ mothering. It’s the only mothering I really know how to do. I am not archetypal mother who dons an apron and helicopters her children. My children happily roam free range, pee in pools and pick their noses.

I am the mother who rejects the dominant cultural narrative of what defines a ‘good’ mother. I am the mother who calls herself a bad mom with her tongue in cheek, not because I am employing a transparent, unimaginative marketing ploy but because I am okay with my imperfections as a parent which goes against the societal imperative for perfection.

It’s not that I’m reveling in ‘bad’ parenting, I’m simply acknowledging that society’s rigid dictates of what a ‘good’ mother is, is not for me. I am not calling myself  bad in order to bait people into saying what a good mother I am, I am calling myself bad to share my insecurities and doubts with other mothers (and fathers) who have felt the same pressure to be the perfect parent and wonder why it’s not enough just to love and protect one’s child without having to live up to a definition of parenting that fits as well as a strait jacket.

I am not conforming to media labels, nor trying to influence the next generation of mothers to embrace neglectful parenting. I am neither trying to glamorize the definition of bad parenting nor bastardize the definition of good parenting. I am simply putting one foot forward each day, doing the best I can while maintaining what is suppose to be a humour blog.

If I offend your sensibilities by embracing my inner badness and the irony that accompanies that term, I won’t apologize. I am what I am as Popeye says and it works for my children and for me. I’m not trying to be defeatist nor passive aggressive by labeling myself ‘bad’. This blog isn’t about me being trendy or joining in to be one of the cool kids, it is simply about being me. In all my redneckkin’ bad glory.

It doesn’t matter one hair on a cat’s ass what other people label my parenting or my reflection of it on my blog. Call it good, call it bad, call it redneck-tastic, but it’s all semantics no matter which side you flip this pancake. In the end the only thing that matters is my son is not rattling the bars of a prison cell with a tin can and my daughter isn’t spending her free time trying to self-medicate with sex in the back seat of some doofus’s car.

So, through my blog, if I encourage more parents to imitate my special brand of BAD PARENTING or feel less isolated because of their own parenting techniques, then I say HELL YA.

Cuz if my two children who are happy and well adjusted after the hell they went through when their brother died BECAUSE (not DESPITE) my parenting helped them, then more children could benefit. Plus the child welfare authorities gave me papers saying that I make bad parenting look good so I figure I’m not the worst role model out there.

*Jumps off her sanctimommy soap box and goes to pour a cup of coffee laced with Bailey’s Irish Cream. Cuz I drink first thing in the morning too. I iz da BAD mutha.*

Editor’s note: This post was written in the wee small hours of the night, listening to Jumby’s sick ragged breath. I wasn’t going to post it, because it is raw and scattered, but I made a promise to myself and my children that this blog be a record of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Feel free to skip it if you are looking for something light and fluffy because that isn’t on today’s menu.

There are moments, no, days really, when I feel wholly unprepared for this mothering gig.

Today is one of those days. It has in fact, been an entire week of these days.

When Bug was alive, I was younger and infinitely more naive. I didn’t or couldn’t comprehend the enormity of the task I faced, raising a disabled child. Fric and Frac weren’t hurdling towards independence with an alarming alacrity and my husband still crawled into bed with me every night.

Three and a half years later and it feels like I’ve just blinked and the world has spun into something I hardly recognize. Suddenly I am alone most days and almost every night, with no husband to talk with, or to share the burden of child rearing with. Grief spun it’s magic on Boo as well and his life – our lives- went in a direction I could have never had foreseen.

My husband, sweet Boo, finds peace stretching his intellect in a job that takes him away from us for more time than any of us care for.

Fric and Frac bounce towards adulthood with every breath they inhale, eager to shed their childlike skins and stretch their boundaries of independence as far as the elastic of youth will let them.

And I found Jumby, sweet Jumby who is everything I hoped for and inspires my heart to grow Grinch-like, with every laugh, every cuddle he awards us with.

But in the background of this new life I’ve worked so hard to build is a shadow of angel wings, hovering over my head, reminding me of how fragile all of this, this life around me, really is.

My naivete has been stripped away leaving me struggling with the hard truth that at any moment life can change and the magic of these moments I wrap myself in can swiftly turn to dusty memories as I once more swim in the quagmire of grief.

It is hard to admit and it shames me to say it, but I’m scared.

I’m scared of what the future holds for my son, my forever boy, the child brought to me by fate and luck and determination. Jumby’s battle for life has been hard fought and too often he walks the precipice of death for my comfort.

I am imminently aware of how quickly his life (and mine) can go sideways with one infection, one bad swallow, one breath.

With Shale I knew this too. But it wasn’t a reality, it was a concept floating at the peripheral of my intellect. Surely he could die, I’d think to myself, but so could any of us. You never know when a bus is going to come out of nowhere and mow you down.

I understood his body was wrong, built differently and more fragile than his siblings while he was waiting to be delivered from the harness of my uterus. I knew Shale was medically fragile but he was strong. Resilient. Until that very moment when he ceased to be.

My child’s death has brought with it a clarity of just how very real death can be, and I look at Jumby and I worry. I worry that I will make a mistake, not notice his resiliency slipping and I will lose the boy I never thought I could love this much until I held him in my arms.

I worry for my older children and the scars they now sport through no fault of their own. I wonder who they would have turned out to be had they not had to bury their little brother at ages eight and nine. I wonder if my grief has added more crisscross scars across their hearts.

They laugh at me when I question them, gently prodding at them to reveal their feelings. They kiss me on my forehead like I’m a dotering old woman and squeeze my hand while assuring me they are fine, they will be fine, they have survived. But it is then that it strikes me, they have survived.

They’re children. And they are survivors. The only thing children should ever have to survive is a fruity old aunt with bad breath pinching their cheeks too hard and the teen aged scars from middle school.

Yet my children, all of my children have survived tragedy.

Fric and Frac and Jumby, enduring perhaps the worst tragedy of all.

This scares me and I wonder if I’m the mother I can be, the mother I should be to these three precious gifts I have been blessed with.

I’m so scared I’m gonna screw it all up.

While other parents dream of empty nests and weddings and graduations, when I close my eyes each night I dream of just one thing:

Having another day with each of them.

I haven’t been blogging much.

Nothing like stating the obvious, eh?

Everyday I sit down and open my laptop and start writing a post to publish here on RMN. And almost everyday, without fail, I scrap the post or save it to finish another day.

I haven’t been able to write what I want and I’m feeling bound and gagged like my husband tied me up with soft purple satin strips and walked away while leaving the ball-gag in so he could go get something to eat.

(Not that he’d ever do such a thing. Really.)

I could tell you I’m weighted down with grief as of late and I’m having a hard time finding my joy. But that would be lying. 

I could say I have been so busy sitting around doing nothing I haven’t had time to compose anything worthy of publishing. But one look at my daily twitter account would betray that falsehood quicker than when the kleenex I used to pad my bra in tenth grade fell out at the feet of the cutest boy in my class.

(It is a mystery why I was such a geek back then when I am the epitome of coolness now. Hmm.)

The truth behind my spotty posting as of late is more complicated than the gossamer weavings of a spider’s web tucked up high in the corner of your ceiling. 

I’m pissed off. 

Okay, so it really isn’t that complicated. I’m mad as hell and I’m tired of muzzling myself. I’m tired of not being able to sit down and compose a post about what happens when you grab your husband’s package while on a six-hour road trip only to hit a pothole. Hint: eyes bulge out and expletives may be uttered.

I made a promise to myself when I started blogging I would focus on the funny. If it didn’t bring joy or wasn’t about remembering how to find joy, I wouldn’t write about it. My life has enough drama filled moments I don’t need to fill my time trying to recapture them.

For the most part, I’ve held true to this promise with few exceptions. I’ve never felt stifled by that decision. Until now. Now I feel as though there are things I need to get off my chest so I can resume my routine of focusing on exaggerating and twisting my daily life for the sheer pleasure of knowing my husband will read this and wish he had remembered to wear a rubber one fateful night long ago, thereby escaping a shotgun wedding and an eternity tethered to me.

So I’m going to stray off the beaten path and do what I never do. I’m going to dump all my pissiness at your proverbial feet in hopes you’ll understand why the bee has been trapped in my bonnet as of late.

Deep breath. (Stay with me peoples. It’ll be quick and painless. Like having sex while intoxicated.) 

I’m pissed with the adoption process my husband and I have been traveling for almost two years now. I’m tired of running along side him in this hamster wheel of bureaucracy and being bound by legalities (and a healthy fear of retribution) to not speak about it.

One day, though, this path will end. I will climb the highest mountain and shout my story for sherpas and villagers everywhere to hear. Or I’ll just open my laptop and press publish. That day cannot come soon enough for me.

Bureaucracy can suck my big hairy toe.

I’m pissed with the anonymous trolls who have nothing better to do in their lives than to mock my parenting, my dead child and me. I won’t lie and say it hasn’t destroyed a bit of the joy I have found in the community of the blogosphere. I prefer my naive belief that as adults we can all agree to disagree and if you have nothing nice to say keep your big fat yap shut.

I have walked through the shadows of hell, holding my children’s hands tightly within mine, to ensure we all survived our unthinkable tragedy as unscathed as possible.

It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t fun. For any of us. For people to diminish my loss and the loss of my children pisses me off.

I don’t write about my son, Shale, for entertainment. I certainly don’t write a post about him to earn money off the revenue I make running ads in my sidebar. I write about my son to help remember him, to preserve the memory of his tiny chubby hands laced with calluses and covered in drool, or his curly blonde hair always sweaty from exertion or how he’d throw his head back and laugh when he did something he deemed extraordinarily funny.

I write about my son so my children will one day understand why I am the person I am today. How his life and his death so deeply impacted my very being and how I struggle to stay aloft the despair that threatens to pull me under every day I live, knowing I will never watch my youngest son grow to be a man. 

I post ads on my site to create revenue so that I can donate money in his name to the Stollery Children’s Hospital. I wanted to be able to do something personally, to show my gratitude to the hospital that fought so hard to keep my son alive for as long as he was. Every damn cent I earn off my words goes straight charity. 

I’m pissed off that my new puppy eats more scat than puppy chow and insists on kissing my face with her shitty breath. And I’m pissed off I’m dumb enough to coo over her and let it happen. Repeatedly.

I’m pissed off I am a damn klutz and am now paying the price for attempting to clean my house. This is just further proof no good can come from household chores.  My twisted knee and myself are proof of this.

I’m pissed my son is eleven years old and still has to be reminded to clip his own damn toenails. Those suckers are like sharp little crack nails and he doesn’t even seem to notice.

Hell, I’m pissed my left boob is noticeably bigger than my right one. I feel lopsided and uneven. I know I’m not alone in this. Women everywhere have uneven boobs. But why don’t guys have unevenly sized testicles? What’s the deal with that? And why don’t bra manufacturers make bras with different shaped cups so one boob isn’t squished and spilling out while the other cup is almost so empty you are eyeballing a box of kleenex like you did in junior high.

But mostly I’m pissed off that people just don’t get it.

Life is short. There is no such thing as tomorrow. Tomorrow is a promise not always kept. I speak from experience. Why do people waste any second of the spun gold known as time as though it’s a renewable resource?

I want to teach my children to focus on finding joy and learning to be amazed with whatever path they choose to travel. To always aspire to be better not bitter.

That’s why I blog. I just needed to remind myself of this and expectorate the pissiness.

Like a cat after coughing up a hairball, I feel much better.

Care to share? Purge your pissiness. You’ll feel better. I promise.