Friday, December 21, 2007

Artsy Fartsy

My son is a good kid. He’s smart, sensitive and funny. Rarely is he in trouble. I’m lucky...

Deep down, though, he’s all boy. Anything to do with cars thrills him. We have a playroom full of teeny tiny cars and big huge ones. Digging in the dirt outside is another one of his pastimes. Add some water and he’s in hog heaven. Anything to do with boogers, burping or other bathroom functions is downright hilarious to him…

This morning as he woke up, there came a noise from him that sounded something like a cross between a duck quacking and a bugle being played quite poorly. He snickered. I snickered.

“That,” he said (with dramatic pause), “was a work of art!”

Thursday, December 13, 2007

The Other Woman

She’s done it again, The Other Woman…

Last night when my son and I arrived home, I was getting things out of the car and he was already on the front porch before I had the chance to notice it: A package, addressed to him.

“Hey, Mom, look! It’s for me! Can I open it?”
I saw the return address and cringed.
“Sure, Baby.”

What I really wanted to do was hunk it into the garbage can, but only after I’d backed over it with my SUV and maybe stomped on it a little with my heels.The sender of the package was my son’s other grandmother. I call her that because she is a stranger to him, a person who last saw him when he was two years old, on the day after his father’s death. I’ve talked about this here before, about my bewilderment with the people who have abandoned us. (See October 5th, 2002) Rather, I should say, abandoned him…

Not long after the October 5th post, my son received another piece of mail from his other grandmother, this time in the form of a letter, or so I thought. I was more suspicious of it than hopeful that it was some attempt to reach out to him, so I opened it. What I found inside infuriated me: It was a copy of a court document regarding the heirs of the estate of his other grandfather. THIS was her way of telling me that my husband’s father had died?!!! I thought how cruel it was to have addressed to my son. I thought how cold it was that someone, anyone could not have even clipped out an obituary to enclose, so I did the search myself and found out that he had passed some three weeks earlier. Surely, then, this communication would be our last from her… Never assume, right?

In the kitchen my son opened the plain brown box, inside was a wrapped Christmas present for him, from “Gramma.”

“Mom, who’s Gramma?”
“Your other grandmother.”
“I have another grandmother?”
“Yes, your dad’s mother.”
“Oh.”
He shook the box a little.
“I wonder what it is? Can I put this under the tree?”
“Sure.”

I left it at that. What else could I do?

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Kid Rock

A few months back, a friend and I took a road trip. We were headed up near Muscle Shoals, but managed to get there by way of Tennessee. So our trip up was about twice as long as the trip back, but we were busy talking and listening to music so it was a lot of fun. It was on that trip that my friend introduced me to the musical stylings of Mr. Kid Rock… I used to think that he was too edgy for me, more of a screamer than a singer, but really he has a great voice and does some excellent guitar work to boot.

So not too long ago, I bought the new CD “Rock N Roll Jesus.” (Yes, the edited version!) It’s a great mixture of rock, rap, and even country music. One of the more engaging songs (to me, anyway) is “Half Your Age.” It’s one of those what-was-I-thinking-when-I-was-with-you songs with a country twang and lots of humor. I was listening to it in the car on the way home last night and my son and I sang along:
“I found someone new
Who treats me better
She don’t bitch about things we ain’t got
When I sing this tune
It don’t upset her
She’s half your age
And twice as hot”

Towards the end of the song my son reached over to turn the volume down to let me know that if the first girl was 40 then that would make the second girl 20, because 20 is half of 40.

Kid Rock = math skills… Cool!