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The Princess and the Polyester Pea and a Bombshell of the Not Breasty Sort

When Mr. G. leaves town the kids and I waste no time in doing all the things we cannot do when he is here. We do wacky stuff like eat Mexican food and sleep without the air conditioner set to 64 degrees. In fact last night I turned the AC all the way up to 68 degrees  (it’s a little warmer upstairs where the bedrooms are). In preparation for my two nights alone in bed I went all crazy and remade the bed.

You see since Mr. G. so enjoys the cool air on him while he sleeps I added an extra blanket to the bed. We sleep with a flat sheet, a blanket and then a fluffy feather comforter inside a duvet. It’s a lot of layers and it keeps me warm until about 4am. At 4am I typically wake up a little overheated. I readjust and fall back asleep. It’s not horrible, but it’s the way I’ve been living for a few years now and it’s not what I’d call “good”. When I remade the bed I stripped it of the blanket and went to just a flat sheet and the duvet. When I put the blanket against my skin I was horrified to find that it’s a really crappy polyester blanket. It’s no wonder I’ve been suffocating.

The problem with making a bed is the same problem as every other part of your life. Without a little distance you have no clue what’s really there.

Last night I slept better than I’d slept in years. I am not meant to spend a third of my life covered in polyester.

On to the bombshell. I am an asshole. This isn’t news, everyone knows I can be/have been/might continue to be. Half of my readers are my family and friends and I’m convinced that the other half of you are waiting for an implosion. Congratulations waiters, this is the day you’ve been waiting for.

Up until last week the internet (the blogoshere in particular) was a place that I saw as Utopian. I thought, wrongly, that bloggers shared snippets of their lives with us. I believed that what they said was true, or at least their truth. Last week a little light was shined on someone local and I suspect that they’ve been running scams and hurting people in the process. I’ve heard from people who were caught in the wake of destruction and I remind myself that white collar crimes have very real victims.

My trust is limited now. I don’t even trust my own judgement as much as I’d like to.

When I read about bloggers quitting their jobs and then going into debt and then asking for money I want to scream at everyone and say STOP GIVING STRANGERS MONEY. And then I want to remind everyone that when you have kids you don’t get to follow your bliss anymore. You get to GET A JOB.

Most importantly, and most bombshellish is the revelation that Shellie Ross is a wanted (arrested?) woman. Shellie Ross tragically lost a child to drowning in December 2009. Laura Freed writing under the pseudoym Madison McGraw started asking questions about Shellie, how the baby died and whatnot. Laura was relentless and clearly saw that something was wrong. I thought at the time that Laura should have laid off and let the Ross family bury their child in relative peace. I posted Laura’s whois data, which is really underhanded, crappy, ____ [you fill in the blank].

Laura (AKA Madison McGraw) came under fire being called every name in the book. She didn’t back down.

Sometimes moms just band together. We see a woman struggling and we try to protect one of our own. Sometimes we stop thinking and just react. When a dead baby is at the center of things we protect the mom the best way we know how because she is living our worst nightmare.

It appears that Shellie Ross is actually Shellie Schnell. Shellie has [probably] abandoned another family in Ohio and owes [it seems] tens of thousands of dollars in back child support. This is completely indefensible behavior.

I’m flawed, we all are. The problem is that the internet is a giant megaphone where we can amplify our flaws and I’ve certainly used this platform more than once to prove to y’all that I’m capable of supreme assholery. What I want to say to Laura is that I’m sorry. I was one of many who led the charge against you, and we were wrong. We did the wrong thing for what we believed were the right reasons. It’s not an excuse and it doesn’t make it any less deplorable, it simply attempts to explain why. It is not nearly as noble as doing the right thing for the right reasons which Laura did here.