Happy New Year! I was rolling around some ideas today about what I wanted to write about for my first blog entry. New Years being a time of reflection on family, life, accomplishments vs. failures, got me thinking about our family and how it fits in with the rest of the world. We are living in the age of social media. There have been articles circulating around the internet waves about parenting styles, how to raise a good kids, "how to not ignore that quiet mom in the group". Subjects from how to get your kids to happily eat kale (you are all lying) to "how to not raise a bully". We read, we forward, we feel good, or maybe we feel like we suck.
We live in an age where almost everyone we know has a computer. Most of them are on social media. We also know that what were "beer muscles" in the eighties are now Facebook muscles in the new millennium. Everyone can have their big, bad, ugly, mean opinion with all the trimmings and no tangible backlash aside from the ever dreaded and completely meaningless "unfriend". Unlike the eighties when beer muscles could get you an ass kickin' with a side of loose teeth, Facebook muscles are flexed with impunity. There are people that spend hours a day trolling social media, looking for a fight, and trying to make other people feel like crap. They criticize this woman for a bad eye job, this woman for nursing too long, another for not nursing at all, this man for putting an NYPD badge on his profile picture. You could be on an author page, a charity page, a politicians page,a mommy blog, or for some real fun, The Matt Walsh Blog. The horrible crap some people say to one another would never happen off that keyboard. Something as simple as George W. holding his new grandkid could turn into a heavy barrage of Berkely t-shirt wearing, Che' Guevera worshipping psychopaths frothing at the fingers with ugly comments.
So, the rest of us try to act normal, at least on our own pages. No false moves or some jackass with Facebook muscles might attack. We all look so bloody normal and awesome. I will take awesome, but in reality we are far from normal. I probably embrace that more than some, accepting the uniqueness of my journey, but even I hold back the crazy train when I am on social media. I would imagine we all have a little crazy town going on under our roof.
So, I may give one of my girls a shout out for good grades or give my little berserker some props for speaking in complete sentences or finally getting potty trained. Perhaps I will take awesome pictures on the riverside of my family communing with nature. awwwwwwe.
I may just...hypothetically (ahem, cough cough)...leave out the part about the little berserker dropping a deuce on the river bank while we were skipping rocks. This hypothetically causing daddy to yell, "Jesus, would you look at your son!" and me running to intervene before he prematurely pulled his pants up, or worse, before the butt-to-hand contamination begins. Wingman daddy digging the e-tool out of the truck bed to bury the offending patty. This all while...again...hypothetically, a group of white water rafters go strolling by hooting and hollering at the spectacle...hypothetically...totally.
People in the "special needs" community like to use the phrase "normal is overrated". Well, I don't know about that. I think it might just be over-reported and the freak show is under-reported. That isn't a bad thing. Everyone doesn't need to know the intimate details of family happenings. Dirty laundry should stay in the hamper and TMI rules do apply. So, if you feel like everyone is normal and you are all alone in your freak show, don't worry. I pulled the little berserker out of a footlocker naked so he could join us for dinner. Don't ask me, man. He likes confined spaces and randomly sheds his clothes. While I was typing this, the aforementioned berserker also tried to feed me a dog biscuit. It actually took me a second to figure out what he had just stuck in my mouth. Dangerous practice, that. Outside of making my point today, I am not going to post it all in gory detail for the public consumption on a daily basis, but it doesn't mean we're normal. So, let's agree that normal is completely over-reported, accept the fact that most people are holding out on you, and just try achieve the happy. Happy can be messy and freaky and completely abby-normal.
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