Oh, Sh!t

So, might as well keep this white trash theme a rollin' because we've got some issues going on down here by the river.

I have the mouth of a truck driver.  Anyone who knows me knows this.  I don't know quite when it started or why it started but once it started it really became a big part of my personality.

I have lovely parents, they RARELY swear.  They are both educators, so it's a little embarrassing on my part that they raised a daughter with such a filthy mouth.  Oh, and I swear in front of them.  All the time.  And have for years.  I also have sworn in front of professors, doctors, definitely on job interviews and in front of my in-laws.  I think I even swore once at my husband's uncle who's a priest.  But he deserved it, believe me.

I know it's a vulgar quality because meeting me for the first time is already like taking a drink from a firehouse let alone the f-bombs that are laced throughout whatever the hell it is I'm talking about.  But I'm an emotional person through and through and I guess it's just not enough for me to try and get my point across without the added swear word here and there for emphasis.  I mean, I'm ALL ABOUT emphasis -- to the point where it surprises me that I don't type in ALL CAPS.  You know...one of THOSE types....

But I'm sure the people around me would say I'm getting my point across just fine and would you mind letting up on the F'bombs and Jesus Christ's so early in the morning, please and thank you.  Sorry, no can do.  I think it's partially because it takes a lot to get me really angry. So, I'm never angry.  Therefore, in order to release a little negative energy here and there -- I swear.  I mean, I'm not robbing banks or killing people -- I'm just using bad language.  A LOT.  Seems to be the better/healthier option, no?  Humor and swearing.  When I look back on it -- it's kept me off Nancy Grace and it's gotten me through a lot.  But I have kids now.  So, hmmm....how's this going to work?

Swearing was fine when I was a waitress in my twenties.  Especially at an Irish bar where my Irish friends used swear words to endearingly describe their grandmother back home.  "She's the fucking salt of the earth, I tell ya."  Swearing is part of the vernacular there -- so, it didn't help my habit one bit that I picked up and used phrases like, "For fuck sake!", "I'm just taking the piss out of you," "Can you spare me a fag?", and "Fucking gobshites went out on the piss last night and jesus, we got absolutely fucking knackered." God, they have some good ones.  I outta bring a couple of those back into the rotation.

So, kids...right.  I have kids.  One of them is already a sponge and the other one is well on his way.  I've tried to do some self monitoring -- you know, like say "shoot" instead of "shit" or "F-er!" instead of "Fuckers."  But clearly being a stay-at-home mom -- I don't exactly have another adult around to keep me honest.  I do the best I can.  But recently?  I think I would give myself a grade of "F" (funny, right?) in this parenting category.

My daughter is potty training.  She's just over 2 1/2 years old and she's doing really well with it.  Except for a couple accidents here and there which are mostly caused by her medication which makes her do one enormous pee mid-morning that she has trouble controlling.  Fair enough.  She even lets me know right away that she's had an accident.  The other day I heard her say, "Awe shit" to herself in the living room and when I came around the corner she was standing in a puddle with her pants wet and in a totally normal voice, "Shit mum, I had an accident."  Yup.  You did.  Two accidents really, you peed your pants and I accidentally taught you how to swear.  Whoops.

Then she said fuck at the dinner table.  In front of both me and my husband.  She was talking to herself about god knows what -- but still -- she kind of said it under her breath.  So my husband says, "Wait, what did you just say?"  And she looked at both of us, swear-to-god, she rolled her eyes (is that even possible already?!?!?!) and said in a completely exasperated tone because of our questioning, "I just said fuck a little bit."

Oh, phew!  You were just saying fuck A LITTLE BIT.  I gottcha.  My bad.  We thought you were saying it a lot!  Silly us.  Later, my husband said, "I'm surprised she didn't say -- I just said it a little bit -- not A LOT like mommy does." Touche, my dear husband, touche.

I'm also not doing very well with the "less is more" parenting approach and have found myself (I know this won't surprise anyone) talking WAY too much when I try to discipline my daughter.  I don't yell at her necessarily, (although I'd be lying if I said I haven't yelled at her before) but I talk way, way, way too much.

For example, she did something, I sat her down for a time out and started to explain what the time out was for, and I was so annoyed and upset with her that I found myself going on and on and on -- and not even really about whatever she had done wrong -- just talking and talking......."and I didn't know I would meet your father in a bar and that we'd end up married, with a condo underwater in a godforsaken place that I spent more time holding political signs on street corners than I care to remember, and then the next thing I know we've got two kids in two years, and...." and thankfully somehow I miraculously came to my senses and realized how much I was rambling on and on in front of my two year old while she's looking at me with a damn-this-bitch-is-crazy look on her face wondering when this completely insane monologue that she can't even understand anyway is going to finally end.  But I was in too deep now.   I had to find some way to stop the madness and wrap up....so I abruptly shifted gears and ended with, "and that is why you do not throw food on the floor.  Ever."  

Yikes.  So clearly when my close friends have stopped by the house to see me and the kids and multiple people have kindly suggested, "Ya, Molly -- I would just say less to her in general.  You know?  Just keep it short, and then move on.  She is only two after all."  Hello?!?!  God, you guys are so right!  You mean she's not my 35 year old best friend who I hang out with all day?  Oh shit, you are totally right, she is two.  Damn it.  What the hell have I been doing?  I really have lost my marbles with this stay-at-home mom gig.  Jesus.

I guess it didn't surprise me when another time recently I was getting on HER nerves and she just dead pan said to me very seriously, "Mum?  Stop with the fucking attitude."  Wow.  A whole sentence this time.  Used in completely the correct context.  Awesome job, Molly.  Must have said that TO HER during one of your blackout monologues about your sordid life.  Wow, major mommy point deduction.  Huge stay-at-home mom technical foul.  Might have even deserved a red card and had me thrown out of the game entirely.  Seriously?  I said that to her at some stage?  Wow, my nerves really are shot.  You know what?  Well played, Haven.  You got me with that one.  Taste of my own medicine.  Damn, girl's got attitude.  I secretly kinda like it.  But man, I gotta clean up my act if I want to stay working this gig!

Talked with the husband about the whole thing and while it may seem like we're making excuses for ourselves so we can keep swearing all we want -- we're definitely going to curb the swearing as much as is humanly possible for two adults who have literally NO FILTER and then hope that our brilliant children will understand when it's appropriate and when it's not appropriate to use "bad" words.

Our kids are going to hear bad words.  I mean we are raising them in Southie for godsake.  But I guess we're going to go with the thinking that we'd rather have them know they exist, know that people say them when they are frustrated but that they should not be used to hurt another person or used in order to be disrespectful to another person.  Like, my daughter who said fuck -- but said it to herself and in her defense "just a little bit."  I guess, I'm kinda of ok with that.  And hopefully by having heard swear words being used -- she won't find them all that fascinating to say in the first place -- we'll kind of take the taboo out of it by not making it a big deal in our house or in our lives.  My aunt's friend, who is a self-described trash talker, wrote an article about this very issue which you can read here.

In the meantime, I am committed to taking things down a notch and leaving the swearing for special circumstances :)  Maybe try, "Shoot!" "Shucks!" "Darnit!" and see if those don't get some traction rather than the all out swearing of my two year old :)  Maybe I'll even take the ol' "Jesum crow" off the shelf and dust that sucker off -- remember saying that?  What the hell does that mean anyway?

If it doesn't work - you can all say, "I told you so" when my kids are two angry driving massholes from Southie.

30 Pack

So just as you thought this was going to be one serious downer of a heart baby post after another....I figured I would lighten the mood a little bit.

Sometimes your life is so chaotic and crazy you just don't have time to stop and smell the flowers.

When you do finally stop and smell the flowers....sometimes you find a 30 Pack of Bud Light holding open your baby gate.

My kids love slamming the baby gate closed over and over and over again.  So I usually put one of those Busy Zoo activity cubes in front of the gate because it's heavy enough to keep it open and it distracts them from realizing the gate they love to slam every five minutes is right behind it.

Now, don't be fooled by my son Scooty McGee who still cannot crawl or walk.  What he lacks in lower body strength and coordination he makes up for with his abs of steel and sheer determination to move anything that is in his way or could potentially slow down the scoot -- which in recent days has definitely picked up some serious speed.

Well, Mr. Muscles can move the Busy Zoo activity cube now-- which is the heaviest toy I could find in the house to block the gate with.  So, desperate times call for desperate measures, and while I don't even remember doing it -- at some point, I must have put a full 30 pack of Bud Light in front of the gate, to block it and keep it open.  (In fairness, I do need the Busy Zoo to put in front of our subwoofer where my son has secretly been shoving tennis balls, magnets, and puzzle pieces into the speaker hole).

I also noticed in taking this picture, that our beloved original Red Sox seats from Fenway park are now a dumping ground for annoyingly colored kid crap and a monkey that looks like it's waiting for the #9 bus to South Station.

Never in my wildest white trash dreams did I think the above scene would be a snapshot of my living space.

And once we drink that 30 pack down (which who are we kidding it'll probably still be there at Christmas our lives are so lame -- unless, of course, I decide to drink the whole damn thing in a moment of weakness and sheer desperation) our honkey-tonk asses are going to have to come up with another solution to block the gate -- you know....like a sweet ass Tiki Torch, RV or hibachi grill.

The Olsen Twins

No, not Mary Kate and Ashley.

Their names are Talbot and TJ, and their father Greg Olsen is a football player for the Panthers.  Greg and his wife Kara found out at their 18 week ultrasound that TJ, the little boy twin, was diagnosed with half a heart.

It's rare that you see something you've experienced personally in High Def with moving music playing in the background.  I guess that's why we go to the movies -- to see something or watch someone else experience things we can relate to.  Well, I can definitely relate to this video and this story.

It's also important to know that money, success, a huge house, and a nice grill don't take away the pain, fear, and worry that come with receiving a diagnosis like this.  It's one of those things that strips away all that stuff and makes us all the same.  We love our spouses and we love our families.  We love our children, and we want them to be healthy and safe.  We don't want anything bad to happen to them.

In this video, the father, Greg says something that completely reminded me of my husband when we were going through this.  He says until his son's diagnosis, throughout his whole life -- if things weren't ok he could always make them better, that his son's diagnosis was the first time he had felt utterly helpless.  It was the first time his wife of eight years had ever seen him cry.  This was exactly the case for my husband on the day we got our diagnosis.

After the diagnosis, I crazily searched the internet for videos like this one.  I tried to picture myself in these people's shoes and desperately wondered what the end of our story would be.  Now, I watch this video and desperately wonder what the end of their story will be.

It's crazy to think that a journey that we are still (thankfully) in -- is just beginning for someone else.  It's hard to get an update today from Echo of Hope and know that the battle is still very precarious for so many heart kids out there.

Talbot and TJ were born on October 9th and TJ will have his first of three open heart's this week.  I can only hope and pray that they weather all the storms that we have and have a similar outcome to ours.

Waiting Room

"Life is like a box of chocolates....you never know which one you're going to get."

If you told me 15 years ago that I was going to be married with two kids, I would have laughed right in your face.

If you told me that not only was I knowingly going to decide to start a family and try to get pregnant but that five months into my first pregnancy my baby would be diagnosed with a very rare and very life threatening heart condition I most definitely would not have laughed but might have said something like, "Seriously? Me? Are you sure?  That doesn't sound like a good idea...umm....at all."

If you then told me that I would have ANOTHER baby a short 18 months after my first kid had two open heart surgeries and all the shenanigans that goes along with that, I would have said, "You've got to be shitting me."

But here I am.  All of those things have happened.  I have survived them and I'm still putting one foot in front of the other the best way I know how.  I never in a million years would have guessed that any of this could be true....and yet, here I am.

Probably THE most important lessons I've learned about being a heart mom is from other heart moms who have been willing to share their experiences with me and from the countless moms and dads I've chatted up in all kinds of doctor's office waiting rooms over the past two and half years.  What?  Chatting up people in a waiting room?  That doesn't sound like you at all.... 

It has probably been the single most humbling experience of my life to meet other moms who wake-up everyday with the same challenges and struggles we all face when raising young kids (paying the mortgage, keeping the marriage together, just generally trying not to lose your mind...) but have so much more on their plate than you would ever think to imagine.

None of these mothers chose this life knowingly.  And I include myself in this.  They never in their wildest dreams ever thought they would have a sick child or a child with physical or psychological limitations.  You wouldn't wish that kind of thing on your worst enemy let alone yourself.  And yet, they get up, they put on their clothes, they try to pull it together mentally to make it out the door and face all the fears, all the worry, all the appointments, the tests, the co-pays, the needle pricks, the therapies, the research, the surgeries, the consults, the consent forms, the support groups, the medications, the monitors, the child care, and all the while....keeping an eye out for those pesky warning signs that your child's health -- mental or otherwise -- has "changed" and you need to let one of your specialists know.  And the goddamn worry that ensues immediately after...is this a big deal?  A little deal?  Are they going to be ok?  It's not easy....but it is the road.

So we all sit in these waiting rooms together.  We know we're all dealing with shit just by virtue of being wherever we are in the first place.  But what you SEE in these waiting rooms is astonishing.  What you talk about in these waiting rooms is as much heartbreaking as it is eye opening.  Everybody has their "cross to bear" and at the same time everyone is positive the person next to them must have it so much worse than they do...and oftentimes we all spend a lot of time saying, "God, I don't know how you do it," to each other when we all know we individually have our own stories and our own challenges and we're just trying to hang in there with it all.  It's kind of a flipped-upside-down/morbid version of the "grass is always greener" concept.  You're just so damn sure you can't possibly have as hard of a life as the person you are sitting next to.    

Being a heart mom has brought me into the lives of an unbelievably wide array of children and families  I knew absolutely nothing about before my daughter was born.  Audiology waiting rooms with moms signing to their kids.  GI waiting rooms with kids playing while hooked up to their feeding tubes. Neurology waiting rooms with these suped-up enormous wheel chairs like I've never seen before holding up and supporting every limb of a child's body.  Physical and Speech therapy waiting rooms where kids are scooting, hopping, limping and backwards army crawling across the floor while other kids are completely silent, not speaking or looking at anyone, speaking but no one can understand what they are saying, yelling and throwing their bodies around because it's the only way they know how to express themselves, or trying to communicate with their parent but repeating the same couple of words over and over and over again.

Just writing that last paragraph was hard and I'm sure reading it was hard.  It's hard to think of people going through these things and not shed tears or feel overwhelmingly "sad" or "sorry" for them and what they are going through.  And I'm sincerely not trying to be depressing here --  or make people feel worse than they already do for not "counting their own blessings" or feeling like -- "how can I complain when other people have it so much worse than I do!"  This is where being a heart mom has changed me forever.  It's not sad.  It's reality.  It's the everyday.

Alright -- so maybe it's not fair to outright say it's not sad.  It's fucking sad.  I'm sad that my daughter has half a heart only because I wish she had a whole one.   But the mothers and fathers that I have met in these waiting rooms are not "sad."  Sad would be far from the list of words I would use to describe my fellow waiting room buddies.  In all honesty, most of us are just grateful to be there at all.  Many of us either had to face the decision of whether or not to terminate our pregnancies after a diagnosis, or feared that our child would not make it in the early days and months after they were born.  Or we had a healthy child at the start in that they were originally smiling, cooing, laughing, giggling, and then all of a sudden one day they just emotionally disappeared from us.  Either way, we've almost lost or feel like we've lost our child in one way or another and sitting in these waiting rooms means we're still riding it out, we're still here, we're making a tough situation work, and we're going to get through it because we owe it to our kids.  We owe it to ourselves.

So, no matter what the severity of the diagnosis is -- and as different our day-to-day's often are  -- we sit in these waiting rooms -- sometimes we talk to each other -- sometimes we don't -- but when we do talk -- there isn't a single mother or father who hasn't said to me in one way or another  -- I had no idea this would be my life.  I had no idea I would face these kinds of challenges.  But now that I am facing them,  I don't know any other way that my life would be.

We have our children with us and we're getting by.  And when it comes down to it -- it's really not any more complicated than that.  Those of us who have lost our children -- and there are many -- would give anything to sit in a waiting room with their child for all of eternity.  We know this and therefore we make it work.  All of it.  Doesn't mean it's pretty, or even all that enjoyable at times, and it sure as hell wasn't what we expected going into this -- but it's what we know.  And once you do enter into this world, what originally felt like the most isolating disaster of a lifetime turns into a place where you are never alone because there is always someone sitting right next to you.