Through the grandparental grapevine, I heard that my son had a girlfriend.

Ben, not Alex. Because if Alex had a girlfriend, he’d try and fart on her to woo her. Which, let’s face it, is how Daver wooed me.

When I asked Ben about his “girlfriend,” rather than chattering on for an hour and a half like he normally does, instead he turned red and ran out of the room laughing, yelling, “I DON’T HAVE A GIRLFRIEND.” Which is precisely how Daver wooed me.

Must run in the family.

Yesterday, he brought up his “girlfriend,” again. By again, I mean that he yelled I DON’T HAVE A GIRLFRIEND, then running around the house for a couple of minutes, before coming back to challenge me, “you can’t guess what my girlfriend’s name is.”

Daver warned him, “don’t challenge your mother unless you want her to know, Ben. If she wants to do something, she WILL.” My heart burst with pride.

Curious now, I asked Ben what “girlfriend” meant to him.

“Well,” he informed me, “it’s someone I like.”

“Does…” I asked hesitantly, worried that I hadn’t properly explained dating to him, “does she know you like her?”

“Well,” he looked at his hands. “No.”

I smiled and informed him that this was someone he had a crush on, not a “girlfriend.” He seemed taken aback.

I asked him if he was going to have her come over to play this summer, and again, he blushed furiously and ran around the house like a maniac. Running around like maniacs is what my children do best and why my single friends use visiting Aunt Becky as “free birth control.”

When he finally came back, he said he was too nervous to ask her to hang out this summer.

I knew I had to act. And now.

“Okay, Ben, when you’re all nervous, you think to yourself, EYE OF THE TIGER,” I pulled out the BIG guns.

He looked confused, so I hollered, “EYE OF THE TIGER.”

He looked even MORE confused. Daver queued up Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” as an A/V tool and I began my wicked Air Guitar Routine. Let me tell you, Pranksters, I would TOTALLY win at any air guitar contest EVER.

Well, the music helped. Soon all three of my children were running around the house, air-playing different instruments (we could form an amazing air rock band) yelling, “EYE OF THE TIGER.”

When the song was over, Ben came back and said, “It worked Mom. I feel like I can do ANYTHING now. I’m all EYE OF THE TIGER.”

Exactly, my child.

Exactly.

————-

Am over at Cafe Mom today. Got two columns for you.

(barely) Surviving Sleep Training

(barely) Surviving Extreme Parenting

When my mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, it was a big secret. Not to me, of course, but to the insurance companies. I remember how she had to hide her treatments, her hospitalizations and her actual diagnosis from going “on record” so as to avoid being labeled as “A Crazy.”

I’m not sure anyone outside of our immediate family knew about her illness.

By the time I was in high school, depression wasn’t something that people expected you to be locked in a padded room for. Hats of to Prozac!

I’ve dealt with generic, boring-ass depression on and off for years; sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse, and I’ve spoken out repeatedly about how I suffered terrible antenatal depression (depression while pregnant).

Antenatal depression is not quite as well-known as postpartum depression – probably because it’s even less glamorous. I mean, who can be depressed while creating a new life INSIDE you? A new life that’s using your liver as a punching bag, giving you insomnia and causing you to pee your pants when you waddle? Not a GOOD mother.

(that was sarcasm)

When my last child, Amelia, was born in a decidedly non-picturesque freakshow carnival that ended with someone drilling into her brain, removing part of it, and then implanting a prosthetic piece of skull into her delicious wee newborn head, that things went from manageable to so beyond anything I could handle.

But she was fine! I berated myself, night after night, as I relived those horrible awful first days in a series of flashbacks.

I was forever delivering that sick baby, having her ripped from my arms and sent off for neurosurgery. I was forever offering her up like Abraham sacrificing Issac, stuck between two horrifying alternatives. In what few dreams I had, I roamed the halls of the hospital, everything stuck in freeze-frame.

Why, I chastised myself, if she had survived, was I in such a state? I couldn’t answer that.

For months following her birth and surgery, I couldn’t leave the house. My beloved roses wilted from lack of care that summer because I simply couldn’t handle even that – a task which had brought me so much joy. I couldn’t do anything. I was mired in one place. Numb. Alone.

Those were the worst days of my life.

It wasn’t for many months that it smacked me upside the head: I had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I wrestled with the realization.

Well, I said to myself, Aunt Becky, that sounds dumb. Fucking man-up here. Get your bitch ass off the couch and fucking do something about it. You’re not a soldier. And sweet baby Jesus, your kid survived! How dare you be so fucking whiny-pants about it?

It took a long time for me to accept that I was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Acceptance, they say, is always the hardest part. But I finally did.

And here’s what I have to say to you, in honor of National Mental Health Month:

Having PTSD is not my fault. It’s not something I need to be ashamed of. It’s not a character flaw. It’s not a plea for sympathy. It’s not something I’m all, “would you like any cheese with that whine?” about. It’s something that is.

I am NOT ashamed to have a mental illness.

My name is Becky Sherrick Harks and I am the face of PTSD.

On Band Back Together, we spend countless hours working to reduce stigmas by bringing the world stories – real stories written by real people – about mental illness, child abuse, domestic violence, substance abuse and all of the other dark places in our lives.

That is what we proudly do.

We’re celebrating National Mental Health Month by doing a stigma-busting blog carnival. We’re telling the world exactly who we are. We’re breaking down stigmas and kicking ass. Mental illness isn’t a death sentence.

Mental illness is a part of who we are. There’s no shame in being who we are. We should celebrate our flaws, embrace our differences and accept them.

It’s time to put a face to as many mental illnesses as we can.

Because stigmas? Stigmas are bullshit.

Please, I beg you Pranksters, help me kick stigmas squarely in the balls (or taco).

You can join us by posting on your own blog and linking up to Band Back Together (that’s the master link-up post) or you can write about it on Band Back Together. (Or both) Time to break down stigmas.

I am proud to be the face of PTSD.

Fuck stigmas.

If you haven’t heard, The Apocalypse is coming. I know this because I saw it on a billboard and billboards never lie. Just like The Internet. It never lies.

Here, see?

This is not NEARLY as Fear Mongering as it should be.

Here, try this one, Pranksters. See if you feel MORE afraid now:

*shudders* It’s the fucking daisies. They get me EVERY time.

Anyway, so this guy said it was SUPPOSED to be the apocalypse back in 1994, but apparently the guy was wrong then. It happens. I mean who WOULDN’T make mistakes while calculating The End of Days?

So this time, he’s sure he’s right. And you know what Pranksters? I’m GLAD. Here’s why.

1) I won’t have to pay off my credit cards! When I’m rotting away in the afterlife, my creditors will too! This is a win.

3) I won’t have to plant any of the shrubbery I bought for my front yard. Let’s be honest here: I’m tired of digging holes and then filling them with plants. Now, I won’t have to!

6) I’ll never have to pen the children’s book: “Shhhh, Baby, Mama’s Hungover.”

10) Hell, I’ll never have to pen ANY book, because I’ll be roasting away in the fiery pits of Hades. This will make looking for a new literary agent or self-publishing a total moot point.

15) I will never have to listen to that stupid fucking duck on the Wonderpets say, “This. Is. SEWIOUS” again, because he’ll be all BLAM! BLAM! DEAD.

21) I’ll never have to worry about getting past those stupid pigs in Angry Birds.

28) No one cares if you’re a size four in hell.

36) I’ll never have to clean another litterbox. Less poo = win for all of us.

45) I won’t have to watch Extreme Couponing and feel guilty that I can’t seem to save three hundred dollars every time I go to the store. Because there will be no stores!

55) I’ll get to hang out with most of LA down in hell.

66) I can stop plotting the demise of Mark Zuckerberg, John C. Mayer OR Jimmy Wales.

78) I’ll never have to hear the words, “social media,” “viral video,” “let’s connect!” or “bloggy” again.

91) I won’t have to worry that someone will send filler flowers (carnations, baby’s breath) to my funeral because there will BE no funeral.

105) I won’t have to hear about the Real Housewives again.

120) I can finally forget about that girl who reminds me of a Chicken McNugget, Snookie.

136) Maybe I can finally get a nap.

————-

Why are YOU excited for the Apocalypse, Pranksters?

I love sleep.

I love sleep so much that I would wear an “I Heart Sleep” shirt around WITHOUT losing a bet. I could compose a sonnet (if I knew how) to sleeping. If I ever hit it big as a Grammy-Winning artist, it would be for my song, “Sleep, You Are My Hero.”

(if I ever hit it big as a fancy director, it will be because of this video:)

On Thursday, Amelia was all, “sleep is bullshit.” And I was all, “um, are we related?” Because sleep is many things, but it’s not bullshit.

Now, part of the allure of sleep is that it eludes me. I can’t sleep like a normal person to save myself. No, I lay up, night after night with stupid commercial jingles and the annoying songs from kids shows running through my head. If I ever meet the person who wrote the “do-do-do Do A Dollop of Daisy,” commercial in person, I will punch them in the taco.

It doesn’t help that my bedroom is haunted.

Well, it’s haunted or the wind whistling through the attic sounds just like a baby screaming. I prefer to go with “it’s haunted” for street cred.

Either way, I’ll wake up because I hear a fake baby crying and run to check on my babies, who are all safely asleep and therefore not screaming.

That doesn’t help my insomnia.

So anyway, back on Thursday, I couldn’t get Amelia to sleep. She was all, “woah, this is pretty awesome to NOT SLEEP,” and I was all, “I love you, shut the fuck up and go to sleep, baby,” because I wanted to go back to the dream I was having where I was eating a castle made of cake. I did not want to get up.

Friday rolled around, and blearily, I went about my day, writing her sleeplessness off to Dave’s faulty genetics.

Friday night, we went through our normal routine: “Can Daddy take you up?”

Amelia, “NOOOOOO! Mommy rock me.”

The girl wouldn’t let Santa Claus, Jesus, or even Hello Kitty (her favorite) rock her. Nope. It’s gotta be Your Aunt Becky.

So I did. And when I put her in bed after rocking her for a couple minutes, instead of rolling over and saying “goodnight,” she screamed the sort of scream that makes me wonder if DCFS is going to bust down my door for child abuse.

I picked her up, rocked her until her eyes rolled back in their sockets, and when I tried to put her down, it was like I tried to submerge her in a vat of bumble bees. (she’s terribly afraid of bumble bees).

It had been an hour and I needed dinner, so I figured, “Okay, AB, time to be all EYE OF THE MOTHERFUCKING TIGER and let her scream for a couple minutes. It won’t kill her.”

No, it didn’t kill her. It nearly killed me, though. I went back up and rocked her. Eventually, she did go to sleep…for a couple of hours. Then she was up.

Rinse, repeat, Saturday AND Sunday.

That makes four fucking nights of not sleeping, which makes hearing Shut Your Whore Mouth on Happy Endings so much less awesome.

I don’t know what’s wrong with her. It could be teething, it could be sleep regression, it could be a cold, it could be nothing.

Or…maybe she’s possessed.

Anyone know an exorcist?

Dear Aunt Becky,

You deleted me? Really? Why was my comment deleted?

When in doubt, assume gnomes.

P.S. I have an overly aggressive-spam filter that catches everything from Your Brilliant Comment to Penis Enlargement Tips in the multiples of thousands per day. Sometimes, I’m lazier than others. Perhaps you can do this for me to ensure not one of your comments goes deleted again.

Dear Aunt Becky,

I am an inconsistent, blogger, twitterer, 4squarer, facebooker, you name it.  All of which, I participate in because it’s fun. Were it not for TwitterSquareSpace, I would have never found you.  With that…

I am being stalked on a daily basis by my bosses wife who has too much time on her hands.

One day I 4squared from where I had lunch with the boss.  I have twittered how the boss is the devil.  All in innocent fun.   But it has now gotten ugly.  Wife watches my every move online, interrogates husband, threatens to kill me.  Do I quit my online shenanigans to appease, or pump it up and bring on the drama?

Oh Prankster, I’m the WRONG person to ask about this sort of thing, because the moment this sort of shit happens, I kick it up a notch. Possibly thirty notches.

So, DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO.

Sounds like Your Stalker is either wildly insecure or crazy or both but since she’s the one who has your bosses balls in a jar under her bed somewhere, you’d best back off the BOSS Tweets. I’d say that anything ELSE is fair game.

Especially gnomes.

Dear Aunt Becky,

John C Mayer is an Asshole, isn’t he….NOT

Is this one of those cryptic messages, like, “The dog barks at midnight over a bowl of saffron gravy?”

Because then I’d have to respond with, “The crow eats ranch dressing.”

Then we’d lock eyes across the room from each other and slowly do the chin-raise-nod, “you know what wins? YOU!” look of appreciation, right before we launched a nuclear missile and blew up whatever the USSR is calling itself these days.

A Manifesto:

by Anti-Social Media Ignoramus, Your Aunt Becky:

1) I wonder what My Toothpaste Brand is doing today on The Twitter.

8 ) It’d be awesome to “connect on The Facebook” with a brand who sent out an automatically-generated Direct Message via The Twitter.

27) I should raise my numbers by following people on The Twitter, then unfollowing them so that I look extra-special*.

64) Why yes, I would like to run a contest so that one of my Pranksters can possibly win a five dollar box of chocolates!

125) Woah, I really should spend actual money on my fake Farmville Farm.

216) I bet if I retweet this, I WILL win a free iPad!

343) I am a “social media maven.”

512) I cannot WAIT to read more about my toilet paper on their Facebook page!

729) You mean I can win a product worth twelve bucks if I spam the hell out of my friends? SCORE! This RULES!

1000) What would Jesus tweet?

1331) I should tweet @Justin Beaver because I just know he’s going to reply one of these days. He’s probably writing a song about me as we speak.

1728) I bet everyone is going to love hearing what I had for lunch today.

2197) I can’t believe I got ousted as Mayor of My Ass on Four-Square.

2744) Man, this blog music is really swell.

3375) I should tweet my blog post every hour on the hour just in case someone missed it.

4096) It’s impossible for two people to have the same idea for a tweet, therefore someone is stealing my tweets.

4913) There are not nearly enough blogs pontificating about the under-representation of kumquats in today’s social media.

5832) I should take myself MORE seriously.

*I don’t actually know why people do this.

For a very brief moment in time, I considered becoming a vet. That was before I realized how unglamorous “expressing anal glands” was and vowed to be Aunt Becky, MD, the diamond-encrusted tiara-wearing, flawlessly brilliant doctor, which makes what I do now even more laughable.

Reach for the stars, kid. Just don’t be surprised if they don’t reach back.

Anyway.

I woke up on Saturday to the whining of two very small, very bored short people. I hadn’t been up for twenty minutes before Amelia was asking to go to the store to buy some Hello Kitty shirts and Alex was grumbling about the solar system he’d constructed out of tennis balls.

Blearily, I suggested we go to the green house – Alex’s favorite hotspot – a prospect that was met with hoots, hollers and elated screams as the two small people struggled to dress themselves.

We spent an hour there before I had to drag them away from the koi ponds and those gazing balls (which they call “planets.”). They were both fairly indignant and I wasn’t quite ready to take them home, so I suggested that we go to the animal shelter to look at cats.

I’m big into shelter animals. Especially the type that aren’t normally adopted. I try to go for the one animal in the whole joint that looks as though no one will ever adopt it (see also: my one-eyed cat named Ophelia; may she rest in peace).

My (NON-SPONSORED) PSA for the day: did you know black cats are less likely to be adopted? Anderson Animal Shelter, where we adopted our cats, was teeming with them. Apparently people still think they’re bad luck. I say, shut your whore mouth and adopt some black cats.

Two hours later, we left with two new cats.

Now I’m stuck naming them.

(I nearly named Alex “Cash,” if that tells you anything.)

We used to foster cats, well before The World’s Crankiest Baby was born, and it turns out that naming cats isn’t all that easy. Our last foster cat, I named “Little Cat” because she was both “little” and a “cat.” I wanted her adopted just so she could be saved from the hell of living as “Little Cat” for the rest of her long life.

The first cat was easy to name. Her shelter name was “Cassie” which is a fine name for a cat, although I immediately called her “Chloe” because I can’t remember names to save my own ass. So Chloe it is.

The second cat, a portly black domestic medium hair, has proved to be trickier. In fact, it’s been so tricky for me to replace his given name, “Kendell,” that I’ve been calling him “Basement Kitty.” Because he hangs in the basement, natch.

I’ve been rolling names around in my mind. Frank? Ed? Bunny? Puppy? Joe? Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre?

You know how you just KNOW when something is right? Well, none of those are.

In the meantime, I’ll keep calling poor Basement Kitty, “Basement Kitty,” until something better comes along. For his sake, I hope it does soon.

What should I name my blurry cat, Pranksters? HALP ME.

I blog under my real name. For as long as I’ve written on Mommy Wants Vodka, I’ve used my real name: Aunt Motherfucking Becky. I WAS plain-old “Becky” until The Real Becky came and smashed my dreams to smithereens. Apparently, there is no room on The Internet for two people named Becky.

Anyway.

There’s a lot of babble about keeping anonymous on The Internet and I completely understand why someone would make that choice. This is not a slam against those who choose to use pseudonyms.

I use my real name: Becky Sherrick Harks, which rules, and not just because I happen to be a narcissistic ass-clown who likes the sound of her own name.

This is why:

0) You never worry about anyone finding out that you have a Super Sekret Blog. Because the moment you’re all, “WOAH THIS IS SO-AND-SO’S SEKRET BLOG,” people find it more alluring and therefore titillating to stalk it. Pop my name into a search engine and BAM! you’ve got me out in the open. Not so exciting for my ex-boyfriends to find if I’m just THERE.

1) It keeps you from talking shit. Sure, a good old fashioned rant feels fucking great, but it feels a hell of a lot less great when someone’s feelers get all hurty. The best way to keep your posts anonymous is to post them via a third-party website, like Band Back Together (for non-rants) and Mushroom Printing (for snarky rants).

1) It ensures you will NEVER have to work again. We ALL know how lazy I am, right? That’s a given. Going to work every day is bullshit. Thanks to using my real name, I’ll never have to work again! What employer wants to Google a prospective employee only to find out that she talks about her vagina on the Internet?

2) You get a whole new identity if you ever decide to be un-Googleable. It’s like entering the Witness Protection Program! I’d have to legally change my name and adopt a new identity, which means I could finally be “Princess Grace of Monaco.”

3) You never have to use those annoying cutesy code words for family members, which makes it easier for people like me, who have tiny brains, to understand your posts without requiring a key.

5) You never worry about slipping up and destroying your persona. Because your persona is YOU, baby. Warts and all.

8 ) People relate better to other people, not personas. Even if it means they’re stalking you on Myspace.

13) You waste a hell of a lot less time blurring out the faces of everyone in pictures like they do on COPS. Not, *ahem* that I watch that show.*

21) You can add your Twitter Feed into your LinkedIN profile, ensuring that alongside the professional updates like, “I recently acquired a multi-billion dollar company,” yours can say, “YOU SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTH AND MAKE ME A PIE, WOMAN!”

34) You realize that when world’s DO collide (online and offline) no one gives much of a shit.

55) People now expect when they meet you that you’ll probably hump their leg while eating a hot dog. That gets any awkwardness out of the way beforehand.

89) You can put your real name on any name badges, as opposed to “Sex Kitten23.” That’s especially helpful if you’re somewhere you want to be taken seriously**, rather than at Stardollars.

144) You know that no one ACTUALLY wants to track you down and make a lamp out of your boobs, because they would have done so already.

233) You know that – anonymous or not – if someone wants to find you, they will.

*MUCH.

**Shut your whore mouth.

————-

Your turn, Pranksters. What do you think about the internet and anonymity? Do you blog under your name or do you use a pseudonym? Why does that word look weird? Why does it smell like oranges in my house? Why does powdered gravy suck so badly?

Computers and I don’t get along very well. We have a long standing history of disagreeing upon things like, “connection failed” because I can clearly see that the connection has NOT fucking failed. That sort of thing makes me flop onto the sofa and wail, “WHY ME, GOD? WHHHYYYY ME?”

Luckily, I have Big Mac. He and I have an understanding: I put up amazing pictures as a screen saver, irregularly update my software and he does as I ask. We’re like Ebony and Ivory, together in perfect motherfucking harmony.

However.

It wasn’t always a yellow-hued music video love affair.

Back in nursing school, I lived at home (just like any hot coed wants to do) with my young son, espousing my brilliant papers onto one of the computers my father owns. I did not own my own computer and my father, God Bless Him, begrudgingly allowed me to use his.

When I say “begrudgingly,” I mean it. Times eleventy-thousand-million.

And by “his” I mean my two-year old son’s computer; the one my brother had fashioned out of old parts to give to my son. My kid had a computer and I did not.

Enrolled in school again, I begged him to install MS Word onto Ben’s computer so that I could properly format the glitteringly stunning papers I had to write. He patently refused, firmly informing me that “Word Pad was good enough*.”

And forget any printing capabilities, Pranksters. He locked those up tight, like I was going to use them to print off pictures of cats playing the piano.

(I was)

I was the only assbag on the planet with access to a printer that had to save papers in Word Pad, email them to myself, then get to school early so that I could print them out. Half of the time, I had to rewrite them.

See, my father is an amateur computer tinkerer. He reads those PC Magazines that sound like Fox News. The headlines are splashy tidbits like, “THIS SPYWARE WILL KILL YOU AND YOUR FAMILY AND YOUR DOG if you don’t install XYZ.” And “HIDDEN WAYS YOUR COMPUTER IS PLOTTING WITH TERRORISTS.”

The articles are more subdued, as you’d expect, but the headlines, well, how can you forget them?

He likes to dick around with the computers he owns – always has – and the ones I used to write my papers were no exception. In fact, I think that was the computer he liked to dick around with most of all.

Otherwise, I cannot possibly explain why he’d actually want to reformat the hard drive so many times. He seemed especially keen to reformat the hard drive once I had something saved onto it. Something, oh I don’t know, like A MAJOR RESEARCH PAPER that I’d been working diligently on for weeks.

It was then and there that I learned to put off today what I can do tomorrow.

It’s also when I learned to never trust a man who trusts that Spyware was going to eat him for breakfast.

*What the hell is Word Pad “good enough” for anyway? I still haven’t a clue.

…well, no, no I hadn’t.

At least, not until I was in Paris.

I was fourteen years old, on tour overseas with my traveling youth orchestra and I’d taken an extended vacation to Paris after the other musicians had gone home. My cousin lived there, you see, and I’d gone to visit him.

(this is me with a non-flasher, my boyfriend, Alex)

(no, my son is not named after him)

(although he was a really nice guy)

Along with my First Experience With Nutella (one which has turned into a full-blown Love Affair), I saw the sights and sounds of the city, including the Mona Lisa and several men, fully naked. Everywhere I went, it seemed, grown men wanted to take off their pants and show me what appeared to be hairy sausages.

I was suitably underwhelmed. These canned Japanese Mushroom-thingies were supposed to make want to have The Sex? I was baffled. I didn’t want The Sex; I wanted a barf bag and a kicky pair of shoes. A busy street, in the subway, outside the Louvre, it seemed that even graveyards were fair game for The Flashing of Aunt Becky.

One rainy day, between meals of steak frites and Nutella crepes, we chose to visit the Père Lachaise Cemetery. My mother, always a bit morbid, wanted to see where a bunch of famous people were buried. I myself wanted assurance that Jim Morrison was, dead, and therefore unable to produce any more of his horrible poetry. Even there, standing between a mausoleum and a grave, a flasher showed me his penis.

To this day, I’ve never seen so many men willing to drop trou and pull out their wangs.

Or, I should say, I hadn’t seen so many men interested in flashing me until I produced two sons of my very own.

And if they grow up to flash their penises (penii?) on the street, well, unlike dressing my son in a tutu, I will have a problem with that.

————

Pranksters, I wanted to say thank you for getting my back yesterday (I should have called that post: Go Ask Aunt Becky: TRAIN-WRECK Edition) There’s very little that gets under my skin more than being improperly accused of something I haven’t – and wouldn’t – do.

I can compose books of sonnets, odes, and entire blogs filled with The Error of My Ways but I take offense, not at being called a shitty mother, but being called out for something I hadn’t done.

When I filmed the video, I expected the “U R gonna make UR son GAY” crowd to come knocking at my door. I had my Delete Finger Ready for their onslaughts.

But this, it was like being accused of “having naturally blond hair” or “being a good writer.” Something that is simply untrue.

So Pranksters, I thank you deeply for reaffirming something I already knew. I have the best, smartest, most full of the awesome community of Pranksters on the Internet.

(I consider you guys family, by the by)(I don’t actually care if that sounds creepy).