I am a warrior fearlessly peering down danger and death everyday.

Well, the reality is I’m actually a giant pansy who hides under the bed and sucks her thumb is afraid of any sort of physical confrontations but in my mind I’m the long lost sister of Braveheart.

Facing grief and wrestling with it every damn day tends to toughen an old bird up. At least in my mind.

I sometimes forget that I’m not the only soldier out on this battlefield; that my loss wasn’t strictly my own. It was also my husband’s and my children’s. I try to remember this, but to be honest, sometimes the rawness of their emotions takes me by surprise and feels like an imaginary cast iron frying pan whacked upside my noggin.

The other day, out of the blue, my lovely daughter was staring out into space with a faraway look on her face.

Thinking she was drooling over some boy at school or envisioning herself as the future wife of some teenaged heart throb, I poked her and asked what was running through that pretty little head of hers.

“I was just wondering what Shale would have looked like when he was a grown up.”

THWACK! That’d be the sound of the ole frying pan up against my head.

“I mean, I also wonder what I’m gonna look like when I’m a grown up, but all I have to do is wait and see. But there is no waiting and seeing with Bug. He’s gone. I miss him so much Mom. And, well, I just was wondering what he’d look like right now, or when he was grown up.”

I swear I heard imaginary birds twittering around my head like in the cartoons and I blinked back the stars I suddenly saw.

I gave her a big hug and told her there wasn’t a day that didn’t go by where I didn’t wonder if he’d grow up to look like his father or like me or some weird hybrid of both of us. I wondered all the time if his hair would have stayed curly and blonde, if he would have been tall like his father and my brother Stretch or if he would have been vertically challenged like both his grandfathers.

Satisfied that she wasn’t alone in her grief, she bounced back into happy form like a damn rubberband and went to find her living brother to go fart on him or push him down a flight of stairs.

Leaving me of course, gasping for breath and wondering. Would he look like Boo? What if he grew up ugly with a big nose and a big bald spot? Would he have been thin? Or one of those potbellied drooling dudes who wheel themselves around asking for spare change to buy smokes with that you see downtown.

I snapped out of it eventually. I mean, this was my child I was thinking of, not some random disabled homeless dude on the street. Even if he was, he’d have been the best looking beggar out there. He’s got his daddy’s genes.

The truth is, all I have to do is look at the photos snapped through the years to get a clear idea of how he would have looked as he grew up. He really didn’t change much, he was very much like his siblings. Cute from the get go.

Well, maybe not, but love will blind a mommy to even the most hideous imperfections. Right?

I remember being Fric’s age and staring at myself and hoping I’d mutate into some beautiful swan. I was desperate to look into the future and find out if I’d be pretty, or thin or tall. I didn’t care much about whether I succeeded in life or had a nourishing career, I just wanted to know if any boys would finally like me.

Hell, I just wanted to know if I was ever gonna grow boobs.

It’s a good thing I didn’t know back then that I wouldn’t sprout a pair until well into my late teens and that even after popping out three babies I still would have a rather small set of girls.

It’s a good thing I didn’t know then that by the time I turned fifteen my twelve year old little sister would be wearing a bra that I could only dream of wearing. The only thing of mine that would fit into my younger sister’s cups was my head. Not so good for the pubescent ego.

It’s probably for the best that I couldn’t have seen myself in the future, slouching about in yoga pants and a ratty teeshirt, still without a bra, not wearing any makeup and my hair in a pony tail, doing my best impersonation as a soccer mom. If I had known then I never would have been a supermodel I may not have had the fortitude to endure all those years of teenaged teasing about my being ‘flat as a board and never been nailed.’

But a small adolescent part of me still wonders what the future will hold for me. I have faith in my children’s gene pool to know they will grow up to be strong, happy, beautiful people. At least in the eyes of those who love them. But what of me?

Will I be a graceful elegant older lady who embraces every wrinkle, every liver spot and still manage to look striking?

Will I lose my height and become a shrunken version of who I am now, stooped over and hobbling around chasing the neighbourhood children with my cane?

Will I be a pleasantly plump elderly woman, the type children love to bury themselves in with hugs, handing out sugar the way crack dealers pimp out their drugs?

Will I keep my hair or will it grow so thin and fine that you can see my skull from underneath? Will I start dying it hideous shades of orange or start wearing a lot of ugly hats?

Will I develop a sudden love of orange lipstick that makes me look like a bad drag queen?

I guess, like my daughter, I will have to wait to find out. And pray that my friends and family keep me away from anything orange in the cosmetic’s departments in the mean time.

Then I found this.

Suddenly my future self flashed before my very eyes.

Not bad. Not bad. At least I have hair and I’m not wearing any funky coloured lipstick.

I always knew I’d be hot stuff.

After a pathetic attempt to start spring cleaning my house this weekend (read: a lot of sighing and whining on my part) I sent the kids outside to murder one another quietly as I abandoned my ill-fated cleaning spree to sit on my deck and play on the interweb.

It was a beautiful day; perfect for washing windows sitting on the deck with my laptop and playing solitaire while I ordered the kids about to pick up garbage. (Someone has to make sure we don’t live in a complete hovel.)

I tried to ignore Fric and Frac and they tried to ignore me. Who wants to pick up dog poop and old pop cans when they could run around, jump on one another and try to make each other eat dirt?

Life was good. I had a cold beverage, a dog by my feet, the sun on my face and a wireless internet connection.

The only thing that could have made the day better was if my husband were home to take the garbage left festering out back to the dump.

I guess you can’t have it all. Sigh.

As I surfed the net and avoided any parental or homeowning obligations, my kids ran around like wildebeests who had just been released from captivity. They argued and bickered and I pretended to be deaf to it all.

I wasn’t going to let a pair of squawking siblings kill my mood.

This would be why I keep winning those parent of the year awards.

I should have known something was wrong when the only thing I could hear was my dog softly farting and the chirping of the birds around me. Every parent worth their salt knows if the kids are quiet trouble soon follows.

This holds true even when they aren’t toddlers. Except they no longer try to flush legos down the toilet, toss the television remote into the garbage or smear makeup all over their bedroom walls.

Nowadays when they are quiet they are planning a mutiny, listing their sibling on e-bay or going online to learn how to hot wire Mom’s car.

I didn’t have to wonder for long where they were or what they were doing. The screaming and bellering led me straight to them.

This was the type of screaming that any parent knows not to ignore. It signals imminent destruction, painful injury or sounds as the three second warning before one of them goes postal and tries to physically rip the limbs off their sibling to beat them with.

I trotted out back to see what was up, mentally preparing myself for the worse. Maybe they fell out of a tree while climbing it, my mind raced in one direction. Maybe a bear found them and thinks they look really tasty, my mind raced in the other direction.

I expected bruised and broken children who needed Florence Nightingale.

What I didn’t expect to find were my children screaming at each other simultaneously, one howling in pain, the other howling indignantly, both of them smacking at each other like two little sissies.

“What’s going on here?” I barked. Which of course is code for “Commence your screaming at me simultaneously so that I can’t understand a word either of you are saying because I really like that when you do that.”

At the sounds of both of them hollering at me in tandem, the only thing I could pick out was one was a ‘booger nut’ and the other was ‘a cheating loser.’

Good to know.

“Slow down, I can’t understand you.” What I did understand was that Fric was sprawled out in a pile of moose poop with little brown nuggets clinging to her hair and covering her shirt. Lovely.

Frac was worse off, though while dung-free, he was shoeless and clutching his foot as though it may fall off.

Both of them were so filthy that the only clean parts of them were where the tear tracks on their faces had streaked down leaving clean stripes amid the filth.

I was tempted to hop in my car and drive off, game to pretend this never happened, but I was pretty sure that wouldn’t win me any more of those mother of the year awards so I soldiered on.

“What happened to your foot?” I could see now Fric’s foot was actually bleeding but he held onto it so tightly I couldn’t really see the injury.

Pushing his hand away, I could see he had stepped on a nail. Great. Thankfully it wasn’t imbedded very deeply and he had already had a tetanus shot.

“Ow. That sucks,” I said as I held his injured foot in my hand. I thought about lecturing him for running around with out shoes on, but at this point I was more interested in why his sister still layed sprawled out on the ground covered in moose pellets.

Both of them had clammed up at this point and just lay there sniveling. Apparently the code of sibling silence had kicked in and neither of them were going to narc the other out.

“Well you can just sit there all day bleeding while your sister starts to attract flies, or we could solve this problem like rational humans and you can tell me what happened.”

Silence.

“Fine. Let me just go get my camera so I can take pictures to put on my blog about what nincoompoops I have for kids.”

Heh. That worked. My daughter’s vanity kicked in and she cracked. Just like an egg.

“We were playing tag,” she sniffed, “and Frac was cheating. He was supposed to count to twenty but he wasn’t-”

“I did too!”

“So I got mad and chased him through the garden and I may have accidentally pushed him but it wasn’t my fault he stepped on the nail,” she concluded.

Nothing like one side of the story to clear things up.

“Uh huh. So just why are you sitting in a pile of poop?”

Frac piped up (rather gleefully I thought) “After I stepped on the nail she was going to go get you but I may have accidentally stuck out my foot and tripped her. It’s not my fault she landed in poop,” he parroted back to me.

“Uh huh.”

I helped Fric up and tried to shake some of the poop pellets loose and then I picked up Frac and helped limp him into the bathroom where I put on my Mommy Doctor hat and tugged the nail loose.

As I doctored Frac up, Fric continued to pick little brown pellets out of her hair and clothing.

“You know guys, there is such a thing as Karma. What goes around comes around,” I explained as I applied antiseptic to Frac’s foot.

“What does that mean,” Fric asked as she started to get ready to shower herself clean.

“It means that if you cheat you will get caught. It means that if you push your brother and he steps on a nail, he may just trip you so that you land in a pile of shit.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. OH. So be nice to each other so that nice things will happen to you. Okay?”

“Okay.”

They hugged it out and the entire incident would soon be forgotten as they moved onto something new to argue and fight over.

But my peaceful afternoon was shattered and I was left wondering what the hell I did for Karma to bite me on the ass and earn such a delightful turn of events as the afternoon had delivered.

Relaying the story later that evening to their father, Boo chimed in that Karma was paying me back.

“Oh, really? Why is that?” I asked him.

“You’re not earning any good karma points lately.”

“Really? Just how does one earn good karma?”

“I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure a blowjob would solve everything.”

Thanks for the spiritual enlightenment Boo. I’ll get right on it.

As a child, when I wasn’t being stuffed into lockers for being such a tool geek, or running around endlessly on a circular track trying to chase my teenaged demons, one could usually find me with my nose in a book.

The books I tended to like the most were the ones written in different languages or were about language themselves.

Nothing fascinated me more than learning how people around the world communicated. I sucked it up like a sponge and was delighted to find I had a knack for picking up new languages rather easily.

(Reflecting back on it now, I realize that perhaps it may have been my obvious distain for the peons who struggled in French and German class that contributed to my geek quotient. I may have had a slight superiority complex when it came to watching my peers struggle to decipher the lessons while I was reading Shakespeare in foreign languages that landed my ass in the back end of a dark locker more than a time or two.)

It probably didn’t help that I would cuss out my tormenters in French or Japanese while they tried to fold me in half and lock me up away from the student population.

I was a charming kid. I swear.

When I found myself knocked up with child unexpectedly I remember looking at baby books and envisioning my child as a multi-lingual cosmopolitan globe trotter who would single handedly bring about world peace, end poverty and solve world famine all the while being able to converse fluently with people from all over the globe.

Never mind my child would be born to a farmer and a redneck, my child would pop out of my womb requesting a tit in three different languages and go on to rise above the mediocrity he or she would be born into.

My delusions were shattered fairly quickly when Fric arrived. Turned out I would be happy if she would just stop using my nipple as her personal chew toy while she screamed at me in a language completely foreign to me. The language of baby.

As she grew my expectations slowly sank like a lead balloon. My once lofty goals of raising a bilingual child suddenly morphed into the more realistic expectations of simply getting her to tell me she had to use the potty in English instead of peeing on the carpet. Turns out, the parenting gig was a lot harder than I had imagined it.

I went from hoping my daughter would pick up a new language to hoping she would just stop picking her nose.

Fric didn’t talk right away. She waited until she was past three before she started to string words together. Her brother Frac, a year younger, was hot on her tail and almost her equal in the speech department. I began to worry I was doing something wrong. How the hell was she supposed to talk with people from all corners of the world if I couldn’t get her to tell me if she wanted a cup of juice?

Just when Boo and I were started to seriously consider banging our heads against the wall in frustration, the gates of language development burst open and all of a sudden I had not one but two toddlers who learned to speak at the exact. same. time.

God can be cruel.

Our suddenly quiet home now had a chorus of “I want, I want..” generally shouted at me in tandem, while my loving demon spawn would back me into the corner while poking at me with sharp sticks and demanding peanut butter sandwiches and sippy cups of grape juice.

I rued the day I ever worried they would learn to speak. Suddenly I couldn’t shut them up.

The bright side of this was their eagerness to learn new words. I could say anything and they would parrot it back to me. I took great pleasure in teaching them to tell everyone who walked into the door that “pwe-marital-sex is bad.”

Or their father’s favorite “Fow-ni-kay-shon is fun.”

It wasn’t until they started cussing like little sailors that I realized that I may be abusing my parental powers.

Thankfully, we survived language development relatively intact and unharmed and I was continually delighted to hear my children have sweet conversations with one another while I hid in my pantry looking for a moment of peace.

It is one of my saddest regrets to this day that I never heard my sweet Bug tell me he “wuved me” or call me Mommy.

Fric and Frac try to make up for this by talking non-stop. Even when I threaten to duct tape their mouths shut politely ask them to be quiet.

Fric has developed my love of languages as well. She is currently learning Spanish and French and takes pride in tormenting her brother with her talent at Pig-Latin. He, in turn, has picked up some cute Russian cuss words from some of the kids he goes to school with and takes great glee at hurling them at her with a sneer.

I feel so proud. It may not be the multi-lingual conversations I had envisioned while I was gestating the little suckers, but I’ll take it.

Last night, after a particularly grueling and long soccer practice with Fric and her team mates (read: I stood around and froze my arse off until I thought I was going to turn into a popsicle) I was eager to come home, put the kids to bed and zone out in front of the computer while wrapped in a soft blanket.

The kids, they had different ideas. Stupid me for raising them to be independent thinkers. This’ll learn me.

After repeatedly asking them to put their soccer gear away, get their pajamas on, brush their teeth and get into bed, my requests fell onto deaf ears. They ran around doing everything except what I had asked of them and I could feel my temper start to rise.

They took note and decided to see just how far they could push me before I snapped like a twig and went bat shit crazy.

It didn’t take long. I finally lost my temper (shocking I know) and bellowed at them. They jumped at my raised voice and then proceeded to roll their eyeballs at me and continued to ignore me.

I momentarily thought of beating them, but let’s face it. The adoption peeps frown on that and more importantly, my kids are almost as big as me. With my luck they would hog-tie me and leave me in the laundry room while they celebrated their mutiny.

Frustrated with them and myself, and really wishing my darling Boo was home (because he just has to whisper and they take heed, immediately running to obey his every command. Not that I’m bitter or anything.) I decided to change tactics. Yelling was getting me nowhere.

I walked into Frac’s bedroom where my two belligerent minions were joking and asked them if there was a problem.

“Why aren’t you listening to me? You are being rude, it’s past your bedtime and you need to do as your told.”

Because reasoning always works with preteen children.

They looked at me trying to calculate just long it would be until I went medieval on their arses while weighing the pros and cons of being obedient.

They must have decided I looked pathetic enough to grant me a reprieve so they immediately apologized and started getting ready for bed.

Satisfied, I went to the kitchen to get a bowl of ice cream (don’t judge me, I earned it) when before long they were farting around again.

I snapped. My spoon clattered into the empty bowl and I abandoned the pint of ice cream on the counter as I went to go knock some heads together. They want mean mommy, by golly, they’ll get her, I thought to myself.

“What is going on in here? Are you having trouble understanding me?” I yelled.

They stopped, stunned into silence.

“Fric, you speak French and Spanish as well as English. Would it help if I used one of those languages or perhaps tried pig-latin?”

She sheepishly shrugged and got busy examining the dirty socks on the floor.

“Frac, are you hard of hearing or are you just not understanding what I asked you to do?”

He stood there, looking miserable and took great interest in his fingernails.

“I mean, really you guys, what language do I need to use to get you to do what you are told?” At this point, I was ready to run away from home.

Continued silence as they both tried not to awaken the hidden dragon locked beneath the exterior they call Mom.

“Are you so busy learning new cuss words on the playground that you have forgotten how to understand the English language? Just what language is it that you think I’m speaking that you think you can ignore?” I persisted.

Frac looks up and I could see the impish look in his eye.

“I guess it’s the language of MOM. We just don’t hear it,” he explained.

That stopped me short. I stood there for a second, stunned by his brave show of insolence and quick thinking and then snarled, “Well I suggest you get fluent in it rather quickly.”

“Yes, Mom,” they nodded and finally got into bed.

Hmm. The language of Mom. Looks like I’ve picked up another language with out even being aware of it.

Now, does anyone have any suggestions on how to teach it to two know-it-all children who have a penchant for tormenting their mother?