Last night, as I was sprawled out on my couch, watching Weeds and trying to ascertain just how many balls I’d need to turn my basement into a ball pit, I heard a rustling sound coming from my garage. Well, I thought to myself, it’s probably not someone delivering delicious cuppity cakes. And it’s probably not the Tell Tale Heart.

After I got lost in thought about a heart-shaped cuppity cake, I realized I could still hear the rustling sound. Okay, it’s probably NOT the wind – that wily bastard – either.

Begrudgingly, I slunk off the couch and wobbled my way to the garage to see what, pray tell, was going on in there. Was it a nitrous party thrown by the kids next door? A Jehovah’s Witness attempting to stone my sinning ass? Had my car come to life?

(I may or may not have been feverish)(I also may or may not have stood there for several minutes giggling at the notion of the nitrous party kids being stoned by a Jehovah’s Witness)

No.

It was neither of those things.

It was an adorably large raccoon, scritchity-scratching at a bag of dog food. But, you’re saying, Aunt Becky, you do not HAVE a dog. And I would reply, languidly sipping my coffee, that I did have a dog. Once. He’s, however, died.

He had the audacity to die RIGHT AFTER I’d bought him a large bag of food. And as often as I’d tried to remember to toss the 8172 pound bag in the back of the Family Roadster and dropping it off at the pet store. I kept meaning to, Pranksters, but the idea of trying to wrangle three kids PLUS a 04780737 pounds of dog food through a busy parking lot, well, it was unappealing.

So in the garage it sat, that sad bag of food for my dead dog, until the raccoon found it and decided that it was, in fact, his food.

I couldn’t disagree.

As I approached the door, still giggling, the raccoon stared at me, eyes wide open, all, “FUCK, I got BUSTED.” I see that same look on my kids’ faces whenever I catch them playing in the toilet. We stared at each other for a moment until he decided to slowly back away, out of the garage.

It was then that I decided instead of a monkey butler named Mr. Pinchey, I instead needed a raccoon sidekick.

I shall call him Walter.

I’ve never been one for family beds.

Before you fire off angry hate mail, let me remind you that I said “I” wasn’t one for them. You can sleep as a family all you want. I just happen to value my sleep and when I have an errant toddler kicking my kidneys, oddly enough, I can’t sleep. And shit knows, I’ve had ENOUGH problems sleeping, I don’t need kidney punches to compound them.

So I’ve done everything I can to make sure that my kids never ended up in bed with me.

Until now.

Amelia seems to have caught my mysterious Oregon Trail disease – or she’s teething – and has decided that sleep is bullshit. No. Sleep is FUCKING bullshit.

Which makes me sad in the pants. Because of all the things I love in the world, sleep is at the top of my list, right alongside cheeseburgers, dating television husbands and celebrity gossip magazines. I simply cannot understand how anyone who shares my genetics could be opposed to sleep.

You’d think after Alex I might’ve learned, but no.

So every night, right around midnight, she wakes up tearful and exhausted. Rather than just rolling over and going back to sleep, our conversations go like this:

Aunt Becky: “Are you hurting, baby pants?”

Mimi: “NO.”

Aunt Becky: “Do you need another binkie?”

Mimi: “NO.”

Aunt Becky: “Do you need a blankie?”

Mimi: “NO.”

Aunt Becky: “A million dollars?”

Mimi: “NO.”

Aunt Becky: “A pony?”

Mimi: “NO.”

Aunt Becky: “Okay, what gives?”

Mimi: “BED.”

Aunt Becky: “Girl pants, you ARE in bed.”

Mimi: “MOMMY’S BED.”

Aunt Becky: “Mimi, no.”

Mimi (begins to scream): “MOOOOOOOOOMMMMY’S BED.”

Aunt Becky (fearful the other two will wake up): “Okay, okay.”

And off I go, toddler in arms, to go rest in my bed. And by “rest,” I mean, “get kicked in the vagina” or “get kicked in the face” until she decides that her bed is less bullshit than mine. At which point, I scoop her up and plop her into her own bed.

I wish someone would give ME a pony when I couldn’t sleep. I’d have a pony FARM by now.

————

How do you guys handle family bed? Do you do it? Can Mimi join you?

———–

I wrote this post about the first thing I thought when I held my son for the first time for ABC’s Million Mom Challenge. It’s worth a read. Even my son liked it!

Also: GULP. I cannot believe I actually wrote something my kid would read!

I bring to you something that will certainly keep you up all night long (but not in a creepy Lionel Ritchie way).

I should be back later with real werds, but for now, have these kitties to keep you company. Oh, and, is it creepy? Or am I just tired?

I was gently asked – nay, begged, by my friend Rachel to do something “touristy” while she was in town over the weekend. In addition to the tours of the dumpster and other assorted places I’d once gotten wasted, I decided it was probably time to actually bother doing something annoyingly touristy. Like stop in the middle of the sidewalk and stare at the tall buildings while making comments about “these here tall buildings.”

However, staring at buildings is only really fun when you’re wasted and they’re swaying because YOU’RE swaying and then you vomit on the shoes of a businessman wandering past you.

I figured it was time to break from tradition and do something awesome, rather than sitting on my couch, watching dancing cat videos. Also: I was afraid Rachel was going to beat my ass.

So I packed the three of us into the old Family Truckster and navigated our way downtown, while fantasizing about how wicked it would be to have “Slasher” as my license plate rather than some letters and numbers. Because, obviously.

We ended up at the Museum of Science and Industry, which is probably MY happiest place on earth (with exception to the Hardware Store, which always trumps all). Like the auto show and Chinatown, it’s a place I’ve been going since I was a wee lass and somewhere I’m always proud to show off to non-locals.

Of course, we showed up an hour before closing. I’m excellent at timing things, Pranksters. Like I should win a medal at it.

And, as per usual, I immediately dragged them up to the anatomy exhibits, because, well, I’d rather swallow my tongue that hear ANY MORE about earth science.

When I showed up there, looking for the gigantic walk-through heart, I saw that the museum had acquired a number of the exhibits from Body Worlds, that traveling exhibition of preserved human bodies prepared using plastination to preserve the anatomical structures.

If you know my great love for anatomy, you’re probably all, “ZOMG AB, THAT SOUNDS FULL OF THE AWESOME!” And I really, really, really want nothing more than to agree with you. That I love looking at these bodies, so beautifully preserved for all to see. For ALL to fall in love with anatomy as I did so many years ago.

But you’d be wrong.

There’s something, I think, macabre about the whole thing. While I love looking at the circulatory system, so neatly preserved and lifelike, there’s something inherently creepy about seeing a dead guy riding a skateboard. Even if I can see the glorious muscular system in use just as it was when he was alive (presuming, of course, that he’d ever ridden a skateboard before).

I recall the day that my anatomy teacher asked me to help with the dissection of our cadaver. It did not bother me to see someone dead, someone preserved in formalin, or someone who once had hopes, dreams, and loved just as I did. No. What bothered me was that he had a shunt in his left leg left intact from the paramedics attempting to save his life.

It dawned on me, as I was examining the circus-like Body Worlds exhibits, that we who count ourselves among the living simply do not want to think of our dead as like us.

It brings it all too close to home, I think.

And while I learned many fascinating tidbits while at the MSI – my liver, for example, is a mere three years old – I walked out of there ruminating about the freakish sideshow of Body Worlds.

My hope is that the Body Worlds exhibits inspire a young crop of anatomists much like I was inspired, as a wee tot, by the mere pictures of the body from an old copy of Grey’s Anatomy.

Otherwise, we’re going to have some seriously fucked up serial killers out there.

Today, Pranksters, I bring you a post from a good friend of mine. He’s asked to remain anonymous, but his story, of course, I wanted to share with you, so you can send him some love.

Much Love,

AB

I’ve always known that I had a problem with infertility. One of the advantages of being a boy is that there are particular things that happen when you’re gleefully getting your rocks off, and if they don’t happen, well, then ain’t nobody having a baby. Pretty simple equation, really. There have been a few times in my life where it all came together, the stars were in the right alignment, and everything worked, but those have been few and far between.

You can imagine my surprise when the love of my life came to me last week and told me that she was late. Now, there are a lot of potential explanations for that one. We’d both been under a lot of stress lately, which I know can take its toll. So, I waited patiently until she was definitely running late and decided that it was probably no big deal.

She came to me the next morning and showed me two lines. The first line was obviously there, bold as brass, practically screaming “YEP, YOU PEED ON ME!” The second was fainter, not as clear, but very definitely a line. It ran from the top to the bottom of the window, and got more solid as I watched it. Under ordinary circumstances my first thought would have been, “When on earth did you have time to slip on in on me?” This woman though, she’s never lied to me, never hurt me, never betrayed my trust even on something as simple as how I like my bagels toasted.

I was thrilled beyond words. I actually picked her up off the ground hugging her, and would have swung her around in a circle if we hadn’t been standing in an enclosed space. She made me feel the little bump that was already apparent to the touch, told me about the weird food cravings she’d been starting to have, and finally told me about how her clothes had started fitting a little bit differently the last week. Apparently she’d known a good week before circumstances forced her to pee on something.

In the matter of days, I’d already thought of all the things that were going to have to happen to get us ready to have a baby. The clothes, the room, the extra cash flow, the people we’d have to tell. I knew we were having a girl, somewhere deep in my heart, and I’d already seen the day that I first held her in my arms and stared into her beautiful eyes. Like her mother’s, they’d bore right into me like I was transparent. Like her mother, she’d wrap me around her little finger in four seconds flat. We told a few people who were really excited for us, figured we would tell other people as we saw them.

Five days ago, she had an early-term miscarriage. We talked it through, and we knew that things could have been better timed for us to bring a child into the world. That this was sad, but not devastating. This was better happening now than a few months later, and most definitely it just meant that something was wrong with the pregnancy and the body was taking care of it. I got a text message from a good friend later that day with a picture of a onesie, black with little skull and crossbones all over it. She said she’d picked it up for us because it was awesome. I got the message in public, while running errands, and it was all I could do not to break down and cry in the middle of the store.

Because I know that this was the best way for it to happen, if we were going to have to have a miscarriage. It had barely developed at all, we hadn’t told everyone we knew, we knew we’d have another chance later for another. Because of all that, I knew that it was the best way for this to happen. That doesn’t take away though, that I lost something last week. I lost not just the pregnancy that we were both excited about and happy to have, but also Possibility. Nights spent watching movies curled up on the couch, and days making cupcakes, and even afternoons spent taking care of a child when they’re sick.

All the possibilities of a lifetime, all burned out in an instant, like a matchstick being blown out in the wind. That’s why I finally broke down last night and cried about it. I feel better now than I did yesterday, and I’ll feel even better tomorrow, but the thing I mourn the most is all the things that could have been. I’d had all the love in the world, and I never even got to say so.

So today I’ll tell you. I loved a child that could have been, and I loved it hard. I was born to be a daddy, and I’d have showed this child all the things that are beautiful in this world. Tomorrow, I’ll think about trying again, but today I’m sorry that I never got to tell it so.

You know, Pranksters, I’ve been feeling a little low lately. Sometimes, you know, you get so much bullshit heaped up on you at once, you just can’t manage to shake it off, eat a goddamned cheeseburger, run around the house screaming BITCH GET ME CHICKEN, while worshiping at the alter of Billy Mays.

It fucking happens.

When it does, though, you start to question yourself; “am I really that smart?” “Is my obsession with Billy Mays cool or creepy?” “What would Bob Ross do?”

Then, if you’re REALLY lucky, the heavens open up and smile down upon you.

Today, they did:

When I first read the title, I got hungry. I mean, I hadn’t eaten a cheeseburger in at LEAST thirty minutes and motherfucker, I was hungry.

So I grabbed out a bucket of BBQ sauce and this magnificent book. It was time to eat me some motherfucking smart fucking kids.

First, I had to decide how to lure these incredibly smart kids into my house so I could properly eat them. Luckily for me, Twix had just sent me a large stash of Twix bars AND a Twix costume, so I knew I could easily lure even the smartest of kids. Who doesn’t love a grown woman dressed as a candy bar? Answer: NO ONE.

I learned, after devouring my first MENSA member that kids? Well, they’re kinda gamey. You can CALL them the other OTHER white meat, but they still taste like boogers and dirt. Even the smart ones!

But I waited, checking every hour to see if my IQ had grown. And, by golly, it had! Suddenly, I knew how to solve complex geometric equations even though I’d spent most of that class sitting in the back row, stoned out of my gourd. It was magic!

What else did I want to raise my IQ in? The possibilities, it seemed, were endless. I want to be the VERY BEST at everything, naturally! In the end, I went for a talented athlete. I’m practically on first-name basis with the ER staff, what with my predisposition to walk merrily into walls and fall jauntily up the stairs.

Soon, Pranksters, as I was licking the BBQ sauce off his tiny bones, I realized that I suddenly COULD run more than three feet without my lungs burning. I felt my muscles tense and flex as I prepared for a nice game of rugby with the neighbor kids. I was ready to kick some little kid ass!

The moral of this story is, Pranksters, that kids taste grimy and mealy – even the brilliant ones – but we can learn so much by eating them. So please, Pranksters, won’t you eat an honor student today?

Honor student – The Other OTHER White Meat.

There are traditions that are bullshit and traditions that are not bullshit. The whole groom removing the bride’s garter with his teeth? Kinda bullshit. It’s just too skeevy for me.

Decorating the Christmas tree while listening to Britney Spears croon, “My Only Wish?” Totally awesome.

One of my favorite traditions – besides drinking gallons of coffee and diet Coke – is to make something so ridiculous, so heinous, and so morally reprehensible as to embarrass as many people as possible. Namely my uber-conservative in-laws.

That’s right, Pranksters, I took a bit from a Saturday Night Live Skit and made my own.

What, I can hear you ask, could you possibly have taken? The weird cheerleader bit? The Church Lady? The Ambiguously Gay Duo?

Nope.

Schweddy Balls.

I know I’ve spoken of it before, but when I was a child, my parents listened almost exclusively to NPR and the local classical radio station. Don’t get me wrong, hearing about how 3000 children in Afghanistan by some horrible disease is pretty much UN-scarring for a kid (also: positive and uplifting), but I spent most of those years, stuck in the living room listening to the announcers drone on and on, praying, hoping, praying that one of them would slip up and swear.

They never did.

So when SNL put together a skit about Alec Baldwin’s Schweddy Balls, it was like a childhood dream come true. FINALLY, those announcers were talking about dirty shit WITHOUT skipping a beat!

Here’s the video for those of you who live in a cave and haven’t seen it.

I’ll wait here while you compose yourself; perhaps get a new chair or keyboard.

So I decided when Alex was a wee babe that what I needed to do was to make Schweddy Balls and put them out for Christmas. If I could successfully dead-pan the delivery of Schweddy Balls to my family, I would win.

(what would I win? Maybe a Mr. Peanut medal or something)

Each year, I’ve diligently made something with a dirty name (Meat Sticks, anyone?), and my own family has laughed uproariously, whereas my in-laws don’t even blink when I say, “Here, try my Schweddy Balls.” Perhaps it’s lost on them.

Either way, it may be September, but I’m already pondering what to make this year for “Schweddy Balls.” I’m thinking Rum Balls, but you know, it’s a Schweddy family recipe, so we’ll see.

Then, this morning, my sister-in-law sent me something on The Facebook. I’m not sure whether to be thrilled or furious at Ben and Jerry’s.

No, the more I think about this, the more I feel Furious George.

Also: hungry.

A couple miles from my house which is a couple miles from my parents house (which goes to show you once you go St. Charles, you never go back), there is a road. Well, if you want to be technical about it, there are lots of roads, especially since I a) do not live in a cow town and 2) roads = easier ways to get to my Uncrustables.

But back in high school, we didn’t have a lot to do, so we drove around. Sometimes we’d play “Summer Car” in the dead of winter, dressing up in our tank tops and short-shorts, cranking the heat to 11. Other times we’d play Pants Off, Drive Off and drive around with no pants. Even then, it appears, pants were bullshit. Sometimes we’d drive around exploring the less developed areas surrounding STC.

An old favorite, though, was to explore Munger Road. An urban legend – completely unverified – passed down through generations of squeally teens said that the three mile stretch of road was haunted. As the urban legend goes, a busload of kids were killed crossing the train tracks. If you sit on the train tracks, baby powder on the bumper, leaving your car in neutral, the ghost train would come through and a buttload of kids would push your car out of the way. Inspection of the bumper would reveal dozens of tiny hand prints.

I cannot tell you, Pranksters, how many times we tried this trick. Which, let me tell you, is a brillz one. I mean, sitting on the train tracks, car in neutral, is probably the smartest thing you can do, when you stop a POS clunker called the Fatty-Bo-Batty-Caddy (Cadillac from the early 1800’s, I think, judging by the shape of the upholstery) ON TOTALLY FUNCTIONAL RAILROAD TRACKS.

Anyway.

I didn’t die, obviously, because I went on to pop out some crotch parasites and become Your Aunt Becky. Nor did we see any tiny ghosticles. Once, I think, we saw a cat. (no, not a Laser Kitty, because OMG, how awesome?)

I’d mostly forgotten about our Munger Road antics until The Twitter informed me of a new movie. Shot in St. Charles, and NOT on Your Mom’s Camera. Like a real movie. In St. Charles.

What’s it about?

Munger Fucking Road*.

You should probably go see it. I bet there’s a scene with me accidentally in it all stumbling out of the bar like, “I fucking love you, street light. Will you marry me?”

*petitioning for a name change for that road, by the by.

 —————

Did your town have any urban legends, Pranksters?

I remember the first time it happened to me: I was recovering from surgery, stuck on the couch, hopped up on pain pills and crying because, well, that’s what pain pills do to me.

See also: abdominal muscles are ACTUALLY pretty important.

See also also: humiliation when you suddenly cannot pee by yourself because standing up hurts like a motherfucker.

I’d stupidly written a post about my struggles with weight and although I hadn’t titled the piece “Being Fat Made Me Invisible,” (which was what the site owner went with) the post was fairly heartfelt.

Now Pranksters, if you learn NOTHING from Your Aunt Becky (besides, “it’s always better not to be Aunt Becky.”) learn this: The Internet has lots of opinions about weight. And people can be cruel.

Anyway, someone got chocolate salty balls about my post – in which I was talking about my OWN struggles with weight, not telling the world to drop a couple LBS – and left a fairly hurtful comment. The pain pills exacerbated my hurt feelers and suddenly I was weeping about the comment. It was just so…mean.

And what’s worse? I couldn’t do shit about it.

On my own blog, I have no shame in deleting a particularly cruel comment. I don’t get them often, but you know what? I don’t need you to take a shit on my nicely swept porch. I know this is a hotly debated piece of the Internet (should you delete nasty comments?) but I, for one, have no shame in using the delete button. Go ahead and talk about how much I suck somewhere else, y’all. My front porch doesn’t need your shit slung on it.

It may surprise you, Pranksters, that I freelance around The Internet.

I also Site Master.

See: Band Back Together.

See also: Mushroom Printing.

The comments on either site are moderated, although, Band Back Together has a more strict set of moderation requirements, because people are pouring out their hearts; the least I can do is protect them from well-meaning-yet-unkind shit.

And recently, on my freelancing posts, the comments I’ve received have become particularly unkind. The sort that make you gasp and feel like you got punched in the gut. Because while you can laugh that shit off some of the time, sometimes, it really, really stings.

When you’re writing about your life – it’s still your life.

Being blasted for it sucks. Period. I don’t know how you’d handle it beyond doing what I do: ignore them. I do not read a single comment from those posts. I don’t need to know how badly I suck at life from Internet Mole People, especially considering my personal blog is an homage to my suckitude.

However, I got to thinking about it.

(shut UP)

(I can think sometimes)

And I genuinely believe that site owners – the sites that aren’t courting controversy – have a responsibility to their writers. Some sort of, “I got your back,” where negative comments are policed and removed. Because frankly, one less Internet Mole Person makes the world a better place.

How fair is it to let your staff get shit on so you can increase your comment count? Doesn’t the person who has the ability to write in non-text speak and know the difference between “there” and “they’re” matter a little bit more than someone flinging shit for the sole purpose of cruelty?

I say, yes.

Now, what do you say, Pranksters?

Should site owners protect their writers?

I remember well, the day I sat in my friend John’s living room, having just bathed an ancient pregnancy test (found – oddly – in a wall in his house) with my pee. I don’t remember what day it was or what I was wearing or what I’d been planning to do that night. I do remember sitting there, smoking a cigarette, watching a line form. Not the first – YAY YOU PEED ON A STICK PROPERLY, DUMBASS – line; a second one.

Certainly it wasn’t a second line. There’s no way it could be a second line. I was on BIRTH CONTROL Y’ALL and really, no, just that wasn’t a second line.

I held it up to the light as it darkened; moving from a light second line to a dark WHOOPS! second line.

Then I made my friend John, in from shoveling the snow, look at it.

“That’s a line, right? It’s a second line? That can’t be a line. How could that be a line?”

John stared down at it, then looked at me with dawning horror. He didn’t speak. He just nodded his head.

That was the first time my life fell on it’s ear.

On August 20 (tomorrow), 2001, at a respectable 3:10PM, I pushed a baby boy from my nether regions, and while he looked at me with a similar look that John had given me – dawning horror – I wrapped him in my arms and kissed his damp head.

I was a mother.

Tasked with raising this extremely squally baby was a big job, I knew that much, but ten years later, I cannot think of a decision I’ve made since that hasn’t involved his well-being.

I dropped out of the medical school track and enrolled in nursing school. I found him a proper father. I gave him two siblings. We fought through autism and custody battles. I gave him the house and the yard and the kid sister and brother I’d dreamed of giving him, back when the days seemed darkest.

Because as blithe as I can be about things, there were days of only tears – no joy – because the decisions I made to better my life for son came with consequences. I was gone more often than not. I was taking a test when my son took his first steps. Speech and Occupational therapy met when I was in class.

While I was trying to give him the world, I missed out on so much. There were days I sat in my car and wept, trying to remember that this was all for the best, that in the end, I would be giving my son the world.

When I met Daver, Benjamin was two, and he took to him like nobody’s business. He took to Dave in a way he’d never taken to me, and while I was thrilled, it broke my heart a little more. I wanted nothing than to know that my struggles, killing my own dreams, everything I’d done, it was all for him.

In a decade, I gave my son everything I’d wanted and more.

He walked me down the aisle as I got married. He watched me march across the stage to graduate with high honors. He’s seen me become a nurse and later, a writer. He’s held his siblings when they were born, joy evident on his tiny face as they looked at him, their big brother, with awe.

There is not a single decision I have made in ten years that has not been for him or because of him.

When I say, “I don’t know where I’d be without Ben,” I mean it. I do not genuinely know.

And frankly, I don’t want to.

As I watch him scamper around outside, pushing his siblings on the swings while the screams of glee echo through my neighborhood, I can hardly believe that I’d once sat in my car, alone, weeping, worried about the future.

I’ve seen the future, and it is beautiful.

So is my son; my precious firstborn.

Happy Birthday, Benjamin. Without you, I wouldn’t be me.

Thank you for turning my life on it’s ear; making me a better person. For making me something I’d never, ever considered becoming: a mother.