Mommy Blogging

So I see from the latest Mountain Xpress that there is going to be a mommy blogger conference right here in Asheville. I kind of got irritated, actually, when I saw that my name wasn't up there as a mommy blogger but then I was forced to pause and reflect on the fact that I am not, actually, a mommy blogger. I have two children, or, rather, I had two children but some years went past and they were replaced with adults in a process that I apparently kind of missed, because I still get a bit weepy eyed and surprised when I come across something like Panda, who is a well loved stuffed animal I found in a closet the other day. "Oh Panda," I snuffled, "Your little boy is not around anymore." It was awful - I'm telling you, it was horrifying. The sentimentality alone sent the sugar content of the air up way too high. Thank the gods that nobody was there to make a cutting, ironic remark, particularly the little boy in question, who specializes in cutting, ironic remarks. Anyhow, my kids are adults now, basically, although the younger one is still sort of in progress, which means that sometimes he's an adult and sometimes he fades in and out and is not at all an adult, which, actually, you could say about me too, so perhaps it is genetic.

However, even if my children were smaller you would not find me at a Type-A Mom conference because frankly I'm much more of a Type-Z Mom. I mean, I have a postcard on my fridge that says I feel if the kids are still alive at five, I've done my job. I am the kind of mother who occasionally took a margarita in a go cup to the playground where my filthy children tussled around on top of the monkey bars while clean, cared for children looked on in envy. I let them run around the neighborhood all on their own and ride public transportation and go with their friends to the park. Sometimes I pulled them out of school for a mental health day and we would all go have a picnic or go to the zoo or just play motel by dragging the air conditioner and the TV into my bedroom so we could lie on the bed and watch TV and eat junkfood. I let them jump on the beds every time we went to an actual motel and when they were babies, I not only weaned them to a bottle, I let them go to bed with said bottle clutched in their chubby fists. By modern standards, I was a frighteningly terrible mother and probably should have been arrested. Oh well. Guess what? Their teeth are fine. They're great people. They even have manners, although how that happened I will never know (I suspect my mother.) They're pretty much completely fine in every way, even wonderful, even amazing - and we all survived lice and broken arms and angry teacher conferences and came out the other side okay. It's been a relief and while I'm sure I would have had a mommy blog if somebody had gotten around to inventing them ten or fifteen years ago, I'm kind of glad I didn't. Because the cutting, ironic remarks would be flinging even faster if I had.