To Be Like Daddy

My youngest seems to finally be ready to potty train!!  The last time I was potty training a little one, my husband was in Iraq for OIF what-the-fuck-ever-number it was.  My husband had played a major role in training our oldest to use the bathroom and did the job so well that the kid was trained day and night by 18 months of age.  Fantastic.  Our daughter was a pain in the ass and was 3 1/2 before she could finally wear big girl panties and not diapers all the time.  Number three was my responsibility with the hubby 10,000 miles away and needless to say, it was not going well. 

But then, R & R rolled around, my husband came home and within two weeks, he had the boy sitting on the toilet to pee.  Best method to potty train: let the child see how the fuck Daddy does it and then do it like him.  So my husband would take the kid in the bathroom, piss, and then put the boy on the toilet to do it himself.  Worked great--until the fucking Army said R & R was over and my husband had to leave.

B did great the first few days after Daddy left for shithole Iraq, but then, inevitably, issues sprang up.  Actually, it was only one issue.  The boy wanted to do it exactly like Daddy, which means standing up to pee.  Only one minor difficulty here.  The kid is too short.  Can't do it like Daddy.  So I encouraged him to continue to sit on the potty to pee and to wait until he got a little bigger.  The boy was having none of this and I discovered rather quickly that he was quite simply not willing to wait to get bigger.

Now I have to give the kid some major props for creative thinking and problem solving.  While I may not agree with the conclusion he reached, it was a well thought out plan.  Two days after the hubby's hasty retreat back to the desert, B announced to me that he had to pee, and I, not realizing that he was unhappy with my preferred methodology, told him to go.  So he went to the bathroom and about 5 minutes later, B has not yet emerged.  So off goes Mommy to investigate. 

And what the fuck do I find in the bathroom?  B has obviously decided that he is going to find a way to pee like Daddy, come hell or high water.  But getting a stool to make himself taller so he can reach to pee standing up was apparently not the way to go, because obviously the problem isn't that he's short.  No.  He has come to the logical (and from his point of view, obvious) conclusion that his penis is too small and if it was larger, he could reach the toilet to pee.  So when I entered the throne room, I found the two year old standing in front of the toilet, brandishing a paper towel roll on his penis, attempting to pee uphill into the toilet!  Gravity was the child's only downfall, because I suppose that in some warped, demented way, his logic was sound.

At least this time around, the fucking Army won't be taking my husband away halfway through the potty training process leaving me with a pool of piss to clean and a boy who has penis envy. . .

10 Years Later. . .

and I'm still fucking pissed off.  September 11th is like Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination, or the Challenger explosion: you will never forget where you were when it happened.  It just so happens that I was sitting at the dining room table in on post housing at Fort Campbell homeschooling my oldest son.  The hubby comes running in (this is not unusual--on post housing has the advantage of being able to go home after PT for breakfast, a shower and maybe a quickie) and asks if I've seen the news.  My reply was some smart ass bitchy comment like, "No.  We're fucking doing schoolwork.  Why?"  And my husband, with all the bluntness of an infantryman, simply told me, "We're going to go kill some motherfuckers." 

And so the TV came on, homeschooling was forgotten and I sat in abject horror as the second plane hit the WTC.  I was on the floor in tears when the towers came down prompting Peter Jennings to say, "Holy fuck!"  I remember trying not to vomit through the coverage of what was happening in DC and Pennsylvania.  And I, like the rest of America, was glued to my television for the next two weeks waiting to hear who had done this to our country and growing angrier by the minute at the arrogance of the bastards who had killed innocent people in such a cowardly fashion to gain their 70 virgins in heaven.  And terrified as I was at the thought of my husband having to leave, I wanted nothing more than for him to "go kill some motherfuckers." 

Ten years, four deployments, and I don't know how many dead motherfuckers later, I'm still angry.  This will never be over until the last of these radical motherfuckers is finding out that the virgins they were promised was a huge fucking lie.  I will never forget but neither will I ever forgive. 

Bigger, Better and Uncut

When my husband went to ANOC he encountered a slew of E6s whose entire goal in life was to prove to everyone else that they were more deserving to be an E7 than everyone else. This is the attitude and behavior pattern that instantly marks someone out as a piece of shit. Let's face it: if you are a good NCO, you don't need to prove a fucking thing to anyone else. Your men already respect you and you just have a presence about you that exudes the power that being an NCO brings. A good NCO doesn't need to brag about himself--everyone he meets will do that for him.

After that fucking school was finally over (and I say fucking school because the man is always either deployed or at yet another fucking school), we went on leave to visit my folks where my husband spent a good portion of our first day there bitching about the asshole, piece of shit, worthless motherfuckers he had met in that shithole. And when the opportunity presented itself after my husband finally quit bitching long enough for anyone else to get a word in edgewise, my father spoke his piece. Now you must understand that my father, unlike me, is a master of eloquence without the need to curse every other fucking word. He rarely curses, generally maintains a good control over his temper, is infinitely patient, generous, and kind hearted. An all-around, good Christian man without any of the hypocrisy that many so-called Christians exhibit. Through my husband's tirade about bad NCOs, lack of integrity, and general shitstorm of f-bombs, my father patiently listened and calmly said at the first opportunity,

"Well, T. It's at times like these that you just need to whip them out and see whose is bigger. . . "