{Originally posted on Goody Bastos}

Juliet: I thought you were going to take out the trash.

Romeo: It’s your turn for the trash, my week to bag the recyclables. Look at the chore wheel on the fridge, for Chrissakes.

Little Tybalt (looking up from his Legos): Mommy, Daddy swore!

Romeo: A greater power than we can contradict hath thwarted our intents to be the best husband and father, I’m sorry, Little Tybalt. It’s just that Mommy and Daddy have been through a lot.

Juliet: I’ll say. There was a plague on both our houses.

Little Tybalt: Hunh? What’s Mom talking about?

Juliet: Never mind. Why don’t you go play Wii?
(Little Tybalt takes his Legos and sulks off)

Juliet (reminiscing while drying the Ikea china): Remember how in love we were?

Romeo: Do I! It seemed to me you were a rich jewel upon the cheek of night.

Juliet: It seemed to me that parting was such sweet sorrow, and now I can’t wait for girl’s night out.

Romeo (slapping his palm to his forehead): O woe!

Juliet: What is it, honey?

Romeo: I forgot to take out the clothes from the washer. They’ll be all mildewy.

Juliet: Again? Didn’t I tell you not to forget to take them out of the washer? Little Tybalt’s gym clothes were in there and he needs them for gymnastics tomorrow. O woeful, woeful, woeful day! Most lamentable day. Most woeful day that ever, ever I did yet behold O day, O day, O day! O hateful day! Never was seen so black a day as this. O woeful day! O woeful day!

{By Tanis from Attack of the Redneck Mommy}

My child recently had to write an essay about the hardest thing he ever had to do. For him, it seems to be trying to keep his damn room clean. It’s mission impossible for a twelve year old sloth I tell you.

But this essay inspired a conversation between us that I have long since been thinking about. He asked me what the hardest thing I ever had to do was.

I didn’t know how to answer him.

What does hard really mean? Gestating and giving birth to three rabid badgers who tore my insides out was hard.

Coming home with a disabled baby no one expected or prepared for was hard.

Trying to explain to people why my beautiful son never smiled was hard.

Spending endless nights, months on end, staring at a boy in a crib in a hospital and wondering if my family would ever be whole and under one roof together was hard. Dealing with one doctor after another in a never ending series of medical emergencies was hard.

Missing field trips and precious moments with my older two children because I had to be with their younger sibling was hard.

Driving alone, in the middle of the night, with a dying child in the back seat of my car was hard.

Looking into my husband’s eyes when he arrived at the hospital and having to find the words to tell him I failed him and our son, was hard. Phoning our family to tell them our boy had died, was hard.

Walking out of the emergency room with nothing but a plastic bag of a dead boy’s belongings was hard.

Mustering up the courage to walk into my childrens rooms, sit them down as their father stood behind me weeping, to tell them their brother died in the middle of the night and they would never have another opportunity to hug him was hard.

Seeing the mound of dirt heaped upon where my boy’s body lie and having to walk away from that boy for the last time, was hard.

Hard doesn’t seem adequate enough.

{by Terra from Raising Zoeyjane}

Twenty. That’s the number of years I was anorexic for. Twenty-one: The smallest my adult waist ever shrunk down to. Two Thousand and Four: The year I got breast implants, thinking that if I felt more proportionate, I’d have a more positive self-regard. 87: The weight I got down to, ten months post-partum. Eight: The number of miscarriages I’ve had, likely owing to a hormone issue brought about by the eating disorder. 100: The number of Cheerios I would allow myself in a day, alongside an apple and a cup of hot chocolate, when I was fifteen. Two: years as a part-time model, during the grunge/heroin-chic period. While on heroin and cocaine. Thirteen: The number of workouts I was doing a week, at twenty and twenty-one. 1000: How many sit-ups I had to do each day, or I was a lazy failure. Four: suicide attempts. One: Year sober, on November 16th.

I sought out an eating disorder at seven years old because I was a chubby kid who got picked on for it, who came from an abusive home, with a single father who minimized me ‘to keep me from becoming egotistical’ and an absent mother. I wanted to disappear, while also wanting to be able to have control over just one thing in my life. I understood the ideology and the permanence of anorexia, and I read hundreds of case studies before I started to restrict, eventually adding over-exercise, vomiting, laxative abuse, amenorrhea, multiple esophageal infections and a prolapsed colon to my resume.

When sex discovered me, it edited the mantra I’d always repeated, ’You are ugly and stupid and fat. No one can stand to be around you’, and made it, ‘You are not too ugly, stupid or fat. Men will want to be around you for sex. This is all you’re worth, so don’t fuck it up.’ This was my law for over a decade.

When a friend in the Vancouver social media community asked me to participate in a date auction she was organizing to raise funds for a writers’ society, you could say I spit-taked. I tried to back my way out of it, before I’d ever agreed to do it. I was positive that she was delusional and I would ruin the whole event, if not simply embarrass myself by drawing in the minimum bid and listless looks from a crowd.

I’d been practicing for years to hide myself, whether with an imaginary wall, or a literal one made of scrubby clothes and hair, no makeup and ragged fingernails. You didn’t see me, generally, unless I’d decided that I wanted to be seen.

This auction was a challenge to that. I didn’t volunteer, I was asked, so I would be on display, felt as if I needed to measure up to some appearance-based ideal, and it wasn’t on my own terms. I agreed to do it, because I’m a pushover who is more concerned with disappointing people than looking like a fool, but I was anxious and considered backing out, or just not showing up, several times.

{by Two Busy}

And in that instant

I am aloft in a way I’ve never known before, a growing cushion of air rising to fill the space between my skin and my seat, the wheels and the road, my head snapping back with effortless, eyeblink ferocity and colliding with the headrest (the crush of my hair against leather, pressing through the foam to touch the steel within) then a whipcrack snap forward, vertebrae compressing and releasing like pistons firing at neural speed, the engine still running strong and loud and my heart surging with adrenaline and

in the periphery of my vision I can see the earth spin and turn, as if the axis of the world has shifted

I think: how odd

and the sound, the sound, it’s incredible, that terrible squeal and crush of metal bending and tearing, iron wrenching from iron and glass and the compression of air in my lungs and those seconds – one, and two, and the long heartbeat stretch to three – when it all dissolves to echo and gravity fades to myth and I become aware that I am still pressing down on the accelerator, as though I might catch up to this impossibly swift rotation of earth and sky and in matching its speed slow its pace and return to the world I’d known and all I hear is the engine the wheels freed from the restraints of physics straining to catch hold on this cool evening air and

then a corner connects – I cannot tell which one, and in not understanding I lose some illusion of control – and there is a new eruption of torque and velocity, of moving so many different ways at once, and I am the tail of a kite arcing and spiraling in a strong wind, diving and soaring and fighting against myself and this thin brace of fabric that cuts deep across my waist and the forgiving skin where neck and shoulder meet

where you had rested your head, seeking solace and comfort and this

is all

it’s all happening so fast

and the adrenaline fills me with strength and fury and my arms and chest swell — with will, with purpose, with terror and defiance and

something catches

{Originally posted on Red State Chief}

I want the United States to be a nation where people of all ages are allowed to experience the consequences of their decisions.

I want the United States to be a nation where the consequences of bad decisions are not hidden or swept under the rug for the purpose of Political Correctness.

I want the United States to be a nation of values, and ethics, and integrity.

I want the United States to be a nation where benefits and comfort come from work, not from voting for the political party that promises more.

I want the United States to be a nation where the government does not treat its citizens like children needing protection from themselves.

I want the United States to be a nation where accomplishment is praised more than raising awareness.

I want the United States to be a nation where objective standards of learning are taught and celebrated.

I want the United States to be a nation where people are taught and encouraged to take responsibility for the circumstances they are in.

I want the United States to be a nation where people are taught and encouraged to take intelligent action if they don’t like the circumstances they are in.

I want the United States to be a nation where the successful are looked to for advice on how to be successful.

Originally Published on Whiskey in My Sippy Cup

By the time this gets posted, most of you who are unfortunate enough to read my little blog will have already voted. And I’ve waited until today to post it because I don’t even for one second want to come across as “this is who you should vote for.” YOU should vote for whoever YOU deem most worthy. This is simply putting it out there for one day, a day far away from now, when I’ll wish I could go back to this day in our history, this monumental day for our nation, and see exactly what the hell I was thinking.

I am a bit of a conspiracy theorist. I will never, ever check Catcher in the Rye out of the library. I totally believe that JFK got shot by the government to get us into ‘Nam. I am fairly sure that we have proof of extra-terrestrial contact tucked away somewhere, and the only reason they interviewed people like my skull-less uncle for Project Blue Book is to hide the evidence. To discredit sightings. To make us THINK it was insanity. Because, really, if that man told me the sky was over my head, that would only mean one thing: I was standing on it.

And so, as my paranoid little mind works, I am predicting a McCain/Palin win tonight. Well, actually, I’m predicting and Obama/Biden win, a big fat temper tantrum, and an eventual GOP win.

It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. *coughgorecough*

I hope that doesn’t happen. I dream that when the GOP starts screaming FALSE COUNTS! that the DNC remembers that we still have a president until January, and we’ll all happily wait while every single vote gets counted, while all the re-votes are cast. If we can dump $750 billion into the market; we can pay the salary of the vote counters for a few extra weeks.

Hell, we’re CREATING JOBS!

But in all sincerity, I dream that I am wrong. I dream that tomorrow night, that socialist, skinny, not-quite-black-enough Muslim terrorist is my new president. I dream that over the next eight years, he gets the chance to make every single person that threw those hideous accusations around about him eat their words.