My Life: A Walmart Commercial

I don't shop at Walmart...I have before, but it's something I try to avoid at all costs (no pun intended.)  Lately, they've been using a commercial where you see a shopping conveyor belt rolling along with a bunch of seemingly unrelated items until you see the person who bought them in a predicament that brings all the items together.  I've realized how very true that is.  You all know that I clean Kindsay's room on occasion...usually when the smell gets bad, when I can't see the floor, or when there's a gnat--whichever is first.  Once again, I found myself cleaning the room.  I'm all alone (I stayed home from work for a special reason), and I'm carrying a garbage bag because...let's face it...90% of the stuff I'm picking up is going in the trash.  I start at the door and work my way to the bed and along the way run into quite a scene....batteries, hm...the socks are pulled out of her drawer, hm....here's a stack of books on a stool that need to be put away, hm...flashlights, three to be exact, on the ground by her bed, hm...a cardboard box, hm...stool is pulled to the lamp by the closet, hm...WHAT'S GOING ON?  Oh no, these items were not random.  Let's back up a bit.
Picture it...eighth grade functional skills room with twelve plus children with varying disabilities and they are gathered around a new display to go over a science concept.  In the midst of these fine children is an incubator with an egg inside, heat emitting from a large bulb in the center while the egg is nestled amongst warmth on the floor.  A few days of watching this spectacularly fascinating egg go by and Voila! Baby chick.  I was not aware of this incubator lab going on, so when I was cleaning her room, I had no idea that Kindsay Einstein Edison was working on her very own self-made, home-based lab...with an egg out of her friend's fridge. 
So the normal human is not going to permit eating a fertilized egg that contains an embryo.  Yummy...sizzling baby and bacon...no.  The eggs I eat are not fertilized and are for my consumption, not my breeding.  Kindsay, the darlin', doesn't get that.  Remember--I left the male out of the reproduction talk?  Now it's coming to bite me...go for it...everything does eventually. 
Back to Kindsay.
Kindsay comes home mortified that I cleaned her room.  Where is all my stuff??  Uh...the trash, where it belongs.  The room was a mess, Kins.  In her most graceful tantrum, she puts together her incubator and pulls an egg nestled at the bottom of a Hanes-Her-Way sock out of her backpack and puts it in the cardboard box, which is sitting on a stack of books, which are set upon her stool, which is pushed up beneath the burning heat of her lamp, which is multiplying its heat with three flashlights that are perfectly aimed at the egg sock.  The conveyor belt all makes sense now.  As I futilely try to explain that there is not going to be a chick any day now, (she has taken the sock to school and took it to church, of course I'm unaware of this!) she is shaking her head, pulling up the laptop on her lap in her bed, and looking up incubators for purchase.  Even though she found a heck of a deal at $50, there was no way I'd ever give the girl another birthday buck again as long as I lived if I thought for a moment it was going towards the purchase of an incubator so she can breed an army of chicks that would turn into chickens, which would make her chicken coop of a room an actual chicken coop.  Of course my heart was broken for her knowing that she'd most likely never experience the joys of procreation and birth (help us all), but at the same time, if I gave in to her now I'd only end up getting bit in the end as she would be begin breeding anything that had potential to live in her room...and that would include more than my nerves can handle.  Not gonna happen.  Yet, compromise always prevails with Kindsay because she will perseverate over this till I jump off my roof, so I tell her--take it to your classroom--maybe your teacher will let you use her incubator!  The light bulb over her head goes on, the bedroom light bulb goes off (along with all three flashlights), and then...I was content and so was she.
Follow up:  Kindsay came home the next day sans egg sock.  I thought she'd come home in complete despair having lost her precious egg as her teacher broke the news of the non-fertilized egg.  Oh, the teacher broke something alright...and it wasn't just the bubble Kindsay bobbed around in..."Where's the egg, Kindsay?"  Oh oh...she says...we broke it, the egg is cracked and we threw it out.  Onward.

Border Patrol

It's no secret that my oldest child is from a previous relationship, although my other children are unaware of that and will continue to be so as long as I can hold them off.  When I say relationship, I mean he was a former boss who dated an employee.  When I say employee, I mean I was a minor preyed upon by an older man (six years older, but hey..when you're seventeen, that's a ton.)  When I say preyed upon, I mean it was date him or lose my job, which I did both eventually.  The sorted story that describes the tumultuous years (was it two?) with him is long and probably, no--definitely--R-rated.  It's nothing I should go into detail about, although it would make a great indie flick.  Actually, most of my pre-Greg years would make a great indie flick, and we'll leave it at that.
In any case, what was done was done and I was with child.  Fast forward nine years and I'm giving the sex talk to my daughter.  It wasn't anything planned in terms of organized conversation, though the need to explain it to her to some degree was premeditated.  I remember the snowball building as I went along until my brakes went out and I was a runaway truck driving the 99.  She would hardly blink her eyes as I described with very little detail to the point where the organs of the process were sketchy in terms of recognizable gender.  What does anyone say besides get out the book made by the "Poo Poo In My Potty" people?  The words were flitting out of my mouth while my hands tried to make some sort of charades-like images in the air.  The math was adding up while I was talking.  She was six months when she met Greg.  He taught her to crawl.  She was three when we married, she was there at the wedding, though to her the big moment of the day was crawling on the back of the statue in front of the temple and waving her arms.  Here she was six years later and none the wiser as she remembers very little about her days of calling him Greg.  He's just always been the dad that she saw her mom marry.
Mmmmk.  So about that...my description of the man fitting together with a woman to create life was brief, but my blurting out that "her dad wasn't her real dad and that she had another person help me create her who she has never met although he did meet her when she was born and saw her again when she was two but she has no idea who he is and would never be able to pick him out between two guys standing in front of her oh and by the way he's Mexican and his last name is Romero" came out even faster and jumbled together like the longest word in a Mary Poppins film.  Too much info...sex and biological fathers.  So, any questions? 
The next day she had school and I worried so much about her.  What is going through her mind?  Is she able to focus at all on school?  Is she telling people about what Mommy told her last night?  Does she look at boys with utter disgust now?  I wished and wished I had waited for the weekend when she could take more time to absorb, then ask, then absorb again.  But no, I had to muddle her life-altering lessons in with her multiplication facts (truly, there were no puns intended but man...that was a good one...multiplication and sex...hah!)
She came home and I watched her, testing her attitude, mood, reactions, etc., before I braved a check-up.  She seemed to be alright except a little quieter than usual.  Could anything be stranger than reproduction?  I mean, yeah...once you've done it it's like--okay, this is how it goes.  But for the first time hearing it?  W-E-I-R-D....W-E-I-R-D.  Ew...WEIRD.  I follow her to her room and try with all the casual tones in my throat to pronounce the words, "how was your day?"  afraid to hear the answer...afraid she'd want drawings, afraid she'd heard some horrid sexual vocabulary like the O word and require explanation (that actually happened to my friend and she had to explain it to her son...bleh.)  She was indifferent in her answer, "fine" the usual, "So...did you have trouble understanding what we talked about, were you confused?  Were you able to focus at school?" 
She answered, "Yeah, it was so weird.  All day I kept playing it over and over in my mind."
Oh no--my baby is thinking about porn!
"I just kept thinking how weird it was and everyone looked different to me."
Oh no--she hates boys...she wants to be a lesbian!  I'm clutching my hands together holding a timid smile.
"I just kept looking at all the kids that I've seen everyday all year and now I see the Mexican kids and think 'I'm one of them.'  It's so weird.  I'm a Mexican."
I sat down trying to put myself into her shoes.  What would that be like to find out your are someone you never identified with before?  So, maybe the additional 'father' information was good to throw into the sex conversation.  I mean, how far away is her mind right now from the big O? With a squeeze of her shoulders and a peck on her head I tell her, "yeah, that's weird huh...but it does explain your beautiful skin!  You're lucky!"  Once again my words of encouragement and gestures of love and affection prove that I truly am...Mother of the Year.