bibliomom

Back when I was young(er) and the internet was new(ish), I entered the amazing world of email. And lo, on the first day I was sent 8,000 forwards. These innocent looking forwards went forth and multiplied and, long story short, by the end of the third day the internet was fully populated with urban legends and witty Top Ten lists.

Shortly thereafter, my darling husband took me aside and explained the whole email urban legend thing, which basically boiled down to: if it seems so amazingly funny/outrageous/urgent that you must immediately forward it on, it’s probably bogus.

Needless to say, I was appalled. All those missing little girl emails were bogus? Look for the details, he told me - lack of specific dates, lack of specific locations and most tellingly, a dead lack of a real phone number or address to contact. After all, email isn’t omniscient.

So as I sit this morning, some 12 years later, seeing: Fwd:Fw:Fwd:FW: Texas Culverts! How would you have liked to find this?” lurking on my email subject line, my myth detector is already tingling.

I just can’t let it be.

My own mother, sender of the dreaded culvert myth. I thought I almost had her off of this stuff a couple years back, but someone’s been feeding her a new supply of crummy forwards again. And since my reply concerning the Cougar Killing Mule wasn’t sufficient, I now have an inbox full of Redneck Waterskiing and Giant Gator in Culvert with a Side of Rattlesnakes.

I hate being the urban legend police.

I’ve looked it up on snopes already - have I mentioned snopes? Best urban legend library ever. I searched “snopes culvert gator” on Google and the appropriate snopes page was the first search result.

Anyway, it is bogus - real pictures, fake text: classic urban legend fodder. So now I just have to email her and remind her - a little more pointedly than last week - to check this stuff out before she passes it on. Or at least before she passes it on to *me*.

It’s a not a pretty job, but somebody’s got to do it. And it might as well be the person with the inbox full of mythological critters.

Cow Orkers here, Cow Orkers there – who are these mysterious Orkers, and what do they have to do with Cows? Every time I go to Ikea, I see doors and aisles reserved for these creatures - creatures I’ve never seen by the light of day. I’ve always pictured them as some sort of bovine Oompa Loompa, scurrying around the giant warehouse, tidying packages and building displays when no one was looking. I also assumed they were Swedish, which would explain their customary habitat in flat-pack warehouses.

But it seems I was sadly mistaken.

My in-box is full of allegedly humorous stories and pictures originated by, or perpetrated upon, these very Orkers. Are they indeed bovine in nature? But then why were they in the office to begin with? And who was foolish enough to give them that accursed cup of coffee? Questions abound, yet answers are few. One thing is for certain – these Orkers are not the benign lutefisk eaters I originally envisioned.

Now there are those who have implied that these poor Orkers were once human, working alongside other humans in business type settings. But how can I possibly believe a ridiculous theory like that? People working side by side in an office would, by necessity, be called “co-workers”. And surely a place of business would be too flush with hyphens to need to resort to calling people “cows” in order to save a few cents on punctuation.

Right?

Sigh But after looking through my in-box again, I just don’t know. Perhaps some strange alien race really is responsible for the spread of these viral missives. If the marked increase in blatant apostrophe abuse is any indicator, then these emails really could the work of some malignant creature bent on crippling the English language. But why? How? And what, if anything, do they have to do with cows?

The world may never know. But I’ll be keeping some spare hyphens around, just in case.

“Mom - I need to learn Spanish.”

“What? Why do you need to learn Spanish?”

“Because … I want to be … in the world travelers club. And I need to know a language.”

“Um, okay – any particular reason you picked Spanish? Did you talk about it at school?”

“No - I just need to learn Spanish.”

“Okay. But you see, Mom doesn’t speak Spanish. Mom took French in school. What do you think about learning French?”

“I think … ”

“Yes?”

“I think you better hurry up and learn some Spanish.”

The summer is over and my house feels all kinds of empty. Messy, but empty. Bug’s off at school all day, so it’s just me and Monkey most of the time. This contrast is all the sharper after the crazy, crazy summer we had. Two nieces and six to nine spare kids flooded my house bringing the noise and chaos only a large group of kids can bring and leaving joyful memories and exhaustion in their wake.

Of course now that I think about it, even if I had all thirteen at the same time, that’s not really that many. I don’t think I did – even my new car only seats seven – but my memory’s a little hazy. One thing I *do* remember is the times when that small herd of kids felt like a hundred.

One memorable day, I confiscated the game controllers and shooed the herd towards the room where the lego tsunami had come to rest.

“But I’m hungry!” one child protested. “Hungry! Hungry! Hungry!”

“But I’m thirsty!” my little Bug chimed in, “Thirsty! Thirsty! Thirsty!”

As they continued to chant, “Hungry!” “Thirsty!” in perfectly pitched repetition, I had to take a firm grip upon my tongue in order to keep from yelling back, “This is not Autism Hour!”

But of course it was. The boy is an eleven year old with Aspergers and my own little Bug is also firmly on the spectrum. They’re both extremely high functioning, but spectrum is spectrum. And no matter how smart, clever and funny they are, it’s a rare day that they let you forget it. In this case, the party trick of repeating the same word or phrase over and over with exactly the same timing and intonation – in unison, for the love of heaven! – was what did me in.

I sheepishly told T’s mother of my near slip up and she absolutely cracked up.

“I love it!” she said, “I’m going to use that, okay?”

So all you spectrum moms out there, let’s celebrate Autism Hour – those times when your spectrum kid just seems to go out of their way to remind you that they absolutely, positively are not neurotypical. And never will be.

And let’s celebrate both kinds of days – those when that one child can make you feel like you’re caring for a hundred, as well as the days when you realize a million neurotypical kids could never take their place.

We’ll laugh even harder when we realize how often it’s the same day.

As a good geek wife, I have learned to deal with the euphemisms of the computer world. Which is to say, when I call my husband to see if he might be stopping by the house sometime in the next week, I’m no longer surprised if he just yells, “It’s all blowing up!” into the phone a couple times and then hangs up.

Geek wife translation? “Sorry dear, things are really hectic at work right now. Don’t wait up for me tonight, because I might not be coming home until morning. If I make it home at all.”

Geek Life really is it’s own thing. But since I grew up a Navy brat, it wasn’t that hard of a transition: military life and geek life are both unique cultures almost completely removed from the 9-5 job set; both have their own jargon and special job requirements; and both are such lifestyle shapers that the culture affects not only the employee, but their entire family. And let’s not forget the bizarre hours that are almost incomprehensible to those outside of that life. In the military, it was “Dad’s on cruise for the next three months – if you’re really good, maybe he’ll bring you something from Japan.” With my kids it’s more like, “Honey, I know that Dad’s home for the first time in three days, but he was paged 120 times yesterday, and he’s still trying to get Zurich back online. Maybe if we’re lucky, he’ll play Xbox with us after dinner.”

But while my husband is a born geek, he didn’t come from geeks. (Well, at least not directly – his Grandmother was a main-frame programmer, but that’s another story.)

No, his family does construction. Serious construction. Concrete, steel, heavy machinery - the works. Let’s put it this way: when I brought my kids up their farm this last summer, they went out to pick cherries.

In the boom truck.

A thirty foot boom truck.

Needless to say, listening in on his phone conversations with his family is fascinating.

“Wow – that’s a lot of snow, Mom … Six foot drifts? … Well, yes, I guess the excavator would take care of that … ”

But this morning the collision of construction and computers was running full tilt.

“Well, it’s been a really busy week at work, Mom … Yes … Well, out of all of the services my group runs, all but one crashed spectacularly and publicly …”

“Yes, Mom – that’s bad …”

Sensing a lack of comprehension, he tried harder to explain:

“Okay, pretend you worked at a factory … You went in that morning expecting to see machinery clicking and humming along … Uh-huh … and instead, you opened the door and saw a giant wall of flames … .”

“No, Mom, it was wasn’t actually on fire … though that has happened before …”

I love my in-laws – they’re fabulous people. I love that they can bring an excavator down when we need to take out a diseased tree and are willing to drop everything to spend quality time with their grandchildren. Their current understanding of geek culture extends to: he makes good money and seems to be paying his bills.

I think I can settle for that ;-).

Time: 9:28 a.m., Sunday morning

Location: master bedroom

Situation: trying to get Bug’s hair bob’s straight before we hop in the time machine and actually make it to Church on-time for once.

Me: “Baby, please hold still – Mama can’t fix your hair if you’re upside down.”

Bug: “Ow! It hurts! Ow, ow!”

Me: “Fine! Go to church with dorky hair!”

Bug: “NOOOOOO! NOT DORKY HAIR! NOOOO!”

And she came back, wiggly but willing, for me to fix the hair bobs so she no longer looked liked she had horns.

Amazing.

And those of you with experience with spectrum kids know exactly what I’m talking about.

Every so often I go through these phases as the mom of a high-functioning spectrum kid: “Oh, look at me whine – she’s not that bad, I’m just undisciplined and messy. Look at X – now she has a real special needs kid. At least I have some real hope that my kids might move out and get jobs some day …”

That sort of thing Usually it’s after Bug’s been fairly well behaved and/or off at school half the day, and I’m just busy being depressed how how messy and disorganized I am.

And usually, she follows up by doing something spectacularly horrific that makes me want to bang my head against a wall till I pass out.

Over the hols, she’s was just more on a low-level reign of terror – hiding under the table and cutting up pads of paper, emptying her drawers onto the floor, arranging the entire stack of paper plates into crop circles on the kitchen floor – nothing spectacular. But now that she’s back in school and I’m finally over the plague, I’ve been more able to follow her around and pretend to be “good-mom”.

“Oh, here honey – let’s cut paper at the table. Oh, here baby – when you color on paper towels with markers, it goes through and stains Mommy’s carpet … like this. Let’s move to the counter and get real paper, okay?”

Which leads to me thinking, “Oh, she’s not that bad, I’m just a whiner.”

Which I am, but that’s not the point ;-P

The point is that DH came downstairs the other night, rolling his eyes and twitching.

“What is up with Bug? She just like a highly concentrated mass of destruction! She sat there, trying to listen to the story and couldn’t leave anything alone – she tore pillows out of cases, ripped tissues out of the box, pulled books off the shelf … man.”

And then I remember, “Oh, that’s right – she’s not an average, neuro-typical kid. She our Bug, and we love her.

As closely as possible.

My son came to me last week, with a book full of story problems.

“M-om,” he whined, “I hate problems like this!”

Since I knew he’d woken up in CWM (Cranky Wookie Mode), I tried to be sympathetic.

“What kind of problems?”

“This kind! ‘If Tina has five doughnuts and Bob has ten doughnuts, and they go to the bakery and get fifteen cookies … ’ that kind of problem!”

Ah, I thought, the curse of the story problems, and went for humor.

“It’s like Mr. Bockel with the pretzels in The Number Devil, huh? Well, story problems aren’t that bad, you just have to find the information you need to solve the problem …”

Monkey howled in frustration.

“It’s not that, Mom! It’s just that there’s all that delicious sounding food, and I’m so hungry!”

Really, I don’t have a whole lot to add to this. It was just something my daughter’s Evil Twin yelled out to her mom as she raced by.

“Ninja Happens.”

Really, it just explains so much …

This last Sunday, after many trials and tribulations, we finally made it to Church. Yes, the boy’s hair and shirt were dripping water, but since he was actually wearing pants at this point, I had decided to call it good.

“Okay,” I said, “you know you’re starting your new class today.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Good. Your new class is held at the small classroom at the front of the auditorium. Now, since there’s a class being held in the auditorium, you need to be quiet. Do you understand.”

“Yes – I should be like this,” he said, while tiptoeing in an exaggerated manner.

“No! I didn’t say dorky, I said quiet. Do You Understand?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Okay.”

I sent him on his merry way and went to my own class, not really giving it a second thought until a friend stopped me in the hall afterwards.

“You must have been late this morning and told Monkey to be quiet,” she said, looking deeply amused.

“Yes …”

“Ah,” she said, “I thought so.”

She paused for another second before continuing.

“He pretty much tiptoed down the center of the auditorium - past the class, past the podium and all the way to his classroom - with his finger held up to his lips.”

I closed my eyes in horror as the scene unfolded in my brain.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she added, “we just stopped class and watched till he was done.”

Yes. Because that makes it *so* much better.