Basically, the title sums it up. I referenced the show Teen Mom and how they show the relationships between family, friends, and boys and the struggles young mothers have.

I was wondering what you guys thought about it?

I watch the show, and do think it can be educational and send a great message, but I'm also against that they pay the girls and that they focus too much on the relationships as opposed to focusing on the other struggles (main struggles) that young mothers, and even older mothers go through.

I found this article interesting, and had read about the Brenda Heist case - the Pennsylvania mom who dropped her kids off at school one day and went missing for 11 years, only to turn herself in last week and admit she just walked away.  She was going through a divorce, had been denied assistance she applied for, and just gave up and went with some hitchhikers to Florida.

So just thought I'd post this here and get some SM thoughts on the article.  We all know "walk away" dads are a dime a dozen and my ex is no different, so should we be shocked and disgusted when cases like this come up?  We've all had our "mommy fail" moments or days.  But has it ever gotten so bad that YOU seriously considered disappearing and starting over somewhere new?  Do you know anyone who has?  I've seen many confessions that state as much so I'm thinking it's not as rare or new as they're making it out to be. 

I will admit this HAS crossed my mind a time or two, but only along the lines of leaving DS with my parents while I start over somewhere, get established with a good place to live, and then have him come back to live with me.  I've never acted on it, because just the thought of being away from him for an extended time is painful and I know what it would do to him.  So along those lines, I guess I cannot fathom being a walk away mom or any mom actually doing it.  How about the rest of you SM's?

Mom Suing School for Not Going Peanut-Free

How far should a school go to accomodate a student with severe allergies? 

One Detroit mom is suing her public school district
because, she charges, they have not gone far enough. Kathy Williams says
her son Nick, 10, could die if he is exposed to peanuts, so she asked
that her entire school to go peanut and tree-nut free. When the school
declined, she filed suit against Livonia Public Schools. 

Plus: The Truth About Food Allergies

“We had asked them to go peanut and tree nut-free, and
their response to us was, due to the upset in the community and the
backlash from other parents, we refuse to change practices,” Williams told a local CBS affiliate. 

”He’s been bullied; he’s been picked on; he’s been beaten
up … had his medicine stolen,” Williams added. She alleges that Nick
must eat his lunch in "an office with cinder block walls," which she
says is alienating and unfair. 

Williams also alleges that other area school districts
have made certain buildings peanut-free if a student has a deadly form
of the allergy.

Williams said she’s been on the receiving end of harsh
criticism from other parents. “‘Why should we have to do this for one
child'?" she says she has been asked. "‘Why don’t you keep him at home?
He doesn’t deserve to be here."

Plus: The Allergy Epidemic

Livonia declined to comment to CBS in a statement saying
that because of pending litigation they were not at liberty to comment,
but are doing all they can to accommodate the student.

But I did want to say one thing.. Depsite such an evil act of violence, there will ALWAYS be more good than evil in the world.

I extend my thoughts and prayers to everyone affected by this horrifying situation.

Smile, because someone may need to see it. Love, because someone may need to feel it. And pray, because someone may need to hear it.

I'm just getting so tired of seeing it, especially in confessions.  So many that admit staying in bad marriages "for the kids".  WHY do you think your kids will be happy seeing you're not?!   Don't you want your kid(s) to have a happy parent?  Yes, I get that it's hard to leave especially for a SAHP who is financially dependent on their spouse.  But there is ALWAYS somewhere to go - family, friends, shelters, support groups, etc, and your spouse will continue to be legally bound to provide for you and the kids through child support and alimony. 

My biggest peeve is when finances aren't really the excuse (yes, excuse), and the reason is you want the kids to have a family with both parents in the house.  Yes, in an ideal world, that's how they would be raised.  But believe me, I spent 10 years of my childhood being one of those kids and it SUCKED majorly!  My parents divorced when I was a few years old, and my mom remarried when I was 5.  I lived with her and my new stepdad, going to my dad's house on the weekends.  I remember that my stepdad was great at first, he took me fishing and we did lots of stuff together.  But then my mom got pregnant with my brother, my stepdad started drinking, and by the time my sister came along two years later he was a fully fledged mean, drunk, asshole alcoholic.  However my mom refused to leave him because she didn't want to a) have a second divorce, b) split up my siblings' parents and have them growing up shuttled to two different homes, like me, and c) she convinced herself she could "fix" him back to the way he was and keep her family together and happy.

So as a result of that, my childhood is riddled with crystal clear memories of them fighting, screaming, mom crying, police calls, and being afraid to go to bed at night for fear of not waking up, or what I would wake up to.  It never changed - my stepfather always woke up mean with a hangover, went out to start drinking after lunch, and by evening or night my mom was calling around to bars and friends' houses trying to track him down.  She pasted a smile on her face for us and pretended for us that everything was okay, but even as kids we knew better and "happy" was not something we felt often, if at all. 

My stepdad would eventually come stumbling home drunk off his ass at some point after we went to bed, and we were inevitably woken by his shouting profanities, threats, and insults, and him screaming about what a worthless piece of shit our mother was.  I never saw bruises so I know she wasn't physically abused, but the verbal abuse was more than enough.  I even remember hearing what I later realized as I grew up was him raping her, because I would hear the noises and later see her walking by the door hugging her clothes to her chest and crying, locking herself in the bathroom to clean up then going to sleep on the couch after he passed out in their room.

Later it got even better (heavy sarcasm).  My mom decided she didn't trust him out at the bars by himself, so she would go with him even if it meant putting up with his drunken verbal abuse in public.  Oh and because we were always broke she couldn't afford a babysitter, and didn't want our family to know we weren't the perfect family, so she TOOK US WITH THEM to bars most of the time (back when they allowed kids at any hour, don't think they do that now).  So they'd pack us along to a bar, or a drinking buddy's house, where we'd get planted at a table with cokes, and expected to be good until "daddy" was ready to leave.  This entailed us watching him get drunker and drunker while my mom got more tense and worried, ending with her finally convincing him to leave because he couldn't stand up anymore.

Of course this led to his drunk ass insisting he would drive, so we got piled into the covered bed of his truck and endured a terrifyingly fast, weaving, jerking, brake slamming, tire screeching ride home while listening to him scream at our mother in the cab, her sobbing, and me generally waiting/hoping for us to plow into a tree and die so it could finally be over.  I don't know how we never did, but it was not for his lack of trying to kill us in this manner, because I remember too many of these rides home.

Finally when I was older I began calling my dad to "come and get me" because my stepdad was being drunk and mean again.  More than once my dad arrived with the police in tow, but nothing ever changed that I noticed until my mom finally agreed to reverse the custody, and let me live with my dad while visiting them on the weekends.  Those two days of the week were still the most terrifying of my life, and my dad finally managed to get it switched to every other weekend, and then to where he would drop me off with her and my siblings to spend time with them in public for a few hours, with my stepdad not around.  Which was great for me, but my brother and sister still had to live with that hell at home and it wasn't until I was in high school that my mom finally left him and got a divorce.  I don't know what finally made her do it, but was glad she did, though sad that it took until my siblings were 6-8 years old and all they knew of childhood to that point was screaming fights and a verbally beaten down, weak, "put on a happy face" mother - all for the sake of "staying together for the kids".

Today, my siblings don't remember much of this.  They were young at the time but I have a feeling they've probably blocked a lot of it out as well, since I remember pretty clearly from the time I was 5.  Not surprisingly, my stepfather died of cirrhosis in his early 40's.  My mother had a second bad relationship with another guy (not an alcoholic), got out of it a few years afterwards, and has been single since. 

To this day, although I never say anything, I hold resentment to her staying with my stepfather so long and thus subjecting us to the childhood from hell.  Yes she eventually got out of it, but for me, it was too little too late and we've never had the mother-daughter relationship I think we could have had if I'd grown up with a mother that was genuinely happy and strong enough to stand up for herself and her kids' needs.  Ironically this bond came with my stepmother, my dad's third wife (the second was awful but not as bad as my stepdad), who was previously in an intensely abusive relationship with my stepsisters' father and got them out of there.  She and my dad have been together 15 years now and I've always gone to her for the "mom" advice I need, while my mother and I maintain more of a friend relationship.

Yes, I know not every bad relationship with kids is to this extreme - some are WORSE, some are just plain unhappy because they're not right for each other or are bored, but I always get SO pissed off when I see a statement that someone is keeping a bad marriage together "for the kids" and not wanting to put them through a separation (because a childhood like ours was much better). 

As one of THOSE kids who had to suffer for this reason, I can tell you that your kids are sponges and almost psychic when it comes to your mood.  You can put on a happy face all you want, you can pretend to the world that everything is fine, but your kids WILL soak in the unhappiness no matter how you try to mask it.  They'll see through the cracks in the façade, that slip in the smile that doesn't reach your eyes, they will hear the fights and pick up on the tense atmosphere that follows, will hear the crying while someone slams out the door, and will see their friends' genuinely happy moms and dads and wonder why their own parents don't act that way.

So please, please, please, think of your kids first and be honest with yourself when you're thinking staying in an unhappy (or worse) marriage is really "for them" and their best interests.  I would so much rather have grown up seeing parents that were 100% happy and loving life, even if it meant spending certain days with dad and certain days with mom in different houses (hey two bedrooms, two sets of toys, double the attention!)...because a child growing up with genuinely happy parents, even separated, is going to be far better off than a child growing up like I did, watching a pasted together marriage that seemed like it would go on forever and wondering what having a happy mommy and daddy would be like.

What say you?

Ok, this past summer was crazy.  In late July the movie theater massacre happened here (at my favorite theater) and lo and behold, bitch-murderer lived two doors down the street from me (figures). Anyway, two weeks later, everything started calming down from that when the neighbor, below us, decided to burn down the four story apartment building adjacent to us where my landlords lived. Two of my neighbors died, everyone was homeless, and two dozen of them were injured (many jumped from 3-4 stories up to hit concrete).  Landlords were the target.  We all had to evacuate (and stay in a shelter overnight while they had a standoff with killer).  It was a five alarm fire.   

Ok, so we've all been through a lot here (hence my anxiety worsening).  My landlords relocated to my building, just doors down the hallway, same floor.  A lot of people moved away from here after all that craziness.  So, here's the thing.  I never lived in the same building as them until August after the fire.  So, I never heard them on a day to day basis.  It's a two-bedroom apartment and the mom lives there with her adult son and his two special needs (mentally) kids. They both scream at the kids all of the time.  My dh has seen the dad degrade the little girl too.  But what really bothers me is how they scream and the way they yell at the kids, especially the girl.  Yesterday, the adult son was almost like growling, "What the fuck is wrong with you!!!! Why are you closing your eyes??? What the FUCK are YOU afraid of???" This is their way of dealing with her issues.  She has a very low-self esteem and feels unloved (says her grandma, adult son's mom). 

Is this abuse or am I being too sensitive?  I lose my shit with dd8 but not often and she is treated with endless love and respect every single day.  They do this all of the time, most of the time.  I just feel so bad for the kids :( It breaks my heart to hear the way they are treated.

I try not to be too judgemental about plastic surgery as a rule. I think it's really sad when people feel that they have to surgically change their appearance in order to feel complete. My step sister got a nose job a couple years back and even though I didn't really approve, I didn't say anything because people have given her a hard time about her nose her whole life and it was clearly a very big deal to her. It just makes me angry that people made her feel like that was her only option. I believe that everyone has their own unique potential for beauty, whether they choose to embrace it is their decision.

But boob jobs are weird to me because I just can't get my head around the concept of big boobs = beauty. Little boobs are pretty too. I could understand someone who had had a mascectomy wanting fake boobs. I could understand someone with saggy boobs after kids wanting a lift. But my friend is one of the most beautiful people I've ever met in realy life. She's tall, naturally thin, and a boy shape. She's always had lots of male attention (we've been friends since we were 14) and she's now happily married. And she has A-cups.

I am so frustrated right now, especially because she JUST said to me yesterday "we're on such a tight budget I can't even afford mascara". But I haven't said anything because I feel it's really her decision. She didn't ask my opinion, and presumably this is a big deal to her even though this is the first I've heard of it. And maybe I'm secretly just mad because her boobs are going to be nicer than mine?

P.S. I'm also pissed her husband is supporting this, isn't it the Hubby's job to say "No Babe, your tits look great."?