Lexi has the chairs set up so she can put on a show tonight. She says she's going to sing and dance.

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Here's something real.

So....I'm working on being authentic and even if this doesn't get read, I need to write it. (I'm not going to promote this post, so whatever happens is what happens.)

My older son was legally my stepson for almost the whole of his childhood.  I had no legal rights to him. My husband made a point to keep reminding me that my child could be taken away from me at any moment...and several times in anger told me to say goodbye to him forever. Of course later I got "apologies." But threaten me once with something that awful and any trust is over.

I had chosen to be his mother. There is nothing I won't do for my kids - no matter what.

The few people who knew at least some of the truth about my life couldn't fathom why I stayed married. It wasn't something I could articulate.

Then I started watching Bones. In season 4 there was an episode called "Doctor In The Den." In that episode Camille the pathologist reconnected with the child of a man she had once been engaged to.

I found the scenes between the two of them utterly heartbreaking. I still couldn't explain things in words...but I can point to that episode and those scenes to get across my reasoning for staying.

I never wanted my son to have a reason to say, "But you left me." So I didn't leave him.

Here's the episode:

My beautiful mama! ❤

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Raise the Age Legislation

Michigan is set to raise the age where teens can be tried as adults.  Here's why I think it's a good idea.

Twelve years ago, at the age of 17, my older son Rickey was involved in a bizarre (seriously bizarre) accident with his then girlfriend in our driveway.

She had her license. He hadn't gotten his learner's permit yet. The car was a stick shift. These parts are important.

They were sitting on the hood of her car, listening to music. The car was off, in neutral, and neither of them could remember later if the parking brake was on.

The girlfriend asked Rickey to change the CD. So he got off the hood of the car and plopped into the driver's seat to do that. Well, he knocked the car into gear or it just moved, or something and she fell off and then the car hit her while she was on the ground. Her arm was broken and her face was all scraped up.

That's when a hysterical  Rickey came in the house to get me. The girl wanted to call her parents instead of an ambulance, and they came almost right away. They told us not to come to the hospital, and that they would call us later. So we stayed home. Rickey was so upset he wasn't able to explain to us what had happened in any coherent way, so I just tried my best to comfort him.

Then a policeman knocked on the door about the accident. To this day I still don't understand why,  but the girl's parents told the policeman at the hospital that Rickey had hit their daughter with the car on purpose. They wanted him arrested.

The policeman demanded a statement from Rickey. Since this was not an accident report being taken, but a criminal investigation, I told the policeman that Rickey didn't have my permission to make any kind of statement.

Then it got ugly. The policeman said, and I quote, "Well, I don't need your permission to take him to jail, and that's where he's going if he doesn't make a statement. He's 17 and that's old enough to go to jail."

I told Rickey to keep his mouth shut, and started explaining to this idiot that you can't arrest somebody as punishment for not giving a statement.

Then it got uglier. He threatened to arrest me for "obstruction" if I didn't tell Rickey to make a statement. That didn't give him his desired result, either.

Please note that my son was in shock, had been sobbing for the past hour, and basically could barely tell you his name. He was terrified of being taken to jail, and the threat to arrest me pushed him over the edge. He wanted to make the damn statement so this jackass would go away.

So, against my better judgement, I told my still sobbing son to write that he was too upset to remember in detail but was giving a statement under threat of arrest. His statement then basically said that his girlfriend fell off the car when he got in it and the car moved.  He reserved the right to amend the statement when his frame of mind was better since he wasn't able to make sense. The end.

I then told the policeman to get the hell out of my house and not come back.

Everything ended up working out okay. His girlfriend insisted it wasn't done on purpose and that she shouldn't have left her car in neutral. No criminal charges. Several days later he ended up giving a coherent amended statement to a different policeman who was frankly shocked at  the way the first statement had been coerced out of us when my son was too upset to even form complete sentences. He called the "crime" a truth is stranger than fiction, bizarre, crazy, stupid accident.

Here's my point:

My son was 17 when this happened. There is no way in whatever hell you believe in that my son should have been threatened with adult jail at all, much less threatened with jail for not giving a statement.

He was a minor, and should not have been threatened in any way for his mother's decision not to allow him to make a statement.

If a person under 18 is going to be legally handicapped by being a minor - curfew laws and other status offenses, etc for example - then the government should not be able to have it both ways.

It's well past time to Raise The Age.