Are You A Member Of The Club?

I love Bloggityville, I really do. But there's definitely a 'class system' in place. Big name blogs get all the readers, the book deals, and loads and loads of comments. And that's so cool. I love them for it. But I have counted many, many times when a blogger has missed the mark. I've gotten quite good at averting my eyes (permanently - no subscription, no following on Twitter). Everything continues on just ducky.

And then every now and then, a Big Name Blogger gets is SO DARNED RIGHT that you just want to cry because it's like they've crawled into your head and picked your brain of all its most awesome thoughts. The language is real. The sentiment is real. And suddenly THEY are real.

Tanis over at Attack of the Redneck Mommy just switched over from 'awesome, but untouchable' to 'I love this woman and want to send her gifts'. This is the post that did it:

Dear Internet: I'm Placing You On Notice

Now, clearly Tanis doesn't need the traffic from my teeny blog. I doubt I'll raise a blip in her blog stats and you know, that's totally fine :) She has no idea who I am, and I love her anyway. But being the mother of a special needs child, I don't think it's going too far to say we share a connection. We're part of a club, that really only the other members of the club can understand fully.

Tanis shared a couple of joke ads on her site and expressed her disgust. I am with her 100% on this. I couldn't even face watching Tropic Thunder recently, despite loving (in general) the stupid comedy of Ben Stiller, because of the barbed jokes steered toward disabled people (Stiller's character, an actor, had previously starred in a movie called Simple Jack, and some of the 'gems' the marketing people came up with for Tropic Thunder referenced this, with the phrase "Never Go Full Retard". Teenage boys watching the movie adopted it as a catchphrase. I've heard it at least three times since, in conversations picked up in public. Can I just say - teenagers these days are, in general, really, really intolerant).

I'm not a confrontational person. In fact, I'm a wimp. I'm the person who hears an insult, stands there with her mouth open and only after the perpetrator has left the scene do I come up with the perfect retaliatory remark. Although, perhaps that's a bit of divine intervention at work, LOL.

Only once have I ever been in a situation in public where I failed to emotionally restrain myself. The rage was radiating out of me as sure as sweat pours off a marathon runner. In that situation, I let fly. I verbally beat that poor person into submission - or at least, I like to think I did. They probably walked off with their friends, chortling at the psycho woman and the weird kid who flapped his arms and still wore a nappy at 5 years of age. Then forgot about me.

But I didn't forget.
Mamas never forget.

You mess with our kids - even in a general sense - and we bite. It's a law of nature. We protect our young. And failing a direct attack on our own children, we will go into bat for any (and all) special needs kids we see who need it. It's what The Club does. It's unspoken, but it goes way down into the very depths of ourselves, our core.

Do you think it is easy, you ignorant idiots (that's the mean people, not you Bloggityville), to walk around each day, living with our hearts outside of our chests? We ache every single day.

Please, take a moment to click on the below links. It might just afford a small window of understanding :)

Shay (Mountain Wings)
Don't Mourn For Us (Jim Sinclair - autism related but interchangeable with other disabilities)
39 Cents Of Understanding (Mountain Wings)