Redneck Mommy’s Inspirational Journey
Tanis Miller
On a recent evening, Tanis Miller was driving home from the hospital after spending the past 10 hours there. She planned to return the following day for another 10 hours. She was there with her recently adopted son, named “Jumby” on her “Attack of the Redneck Mommy” blog. She and her husband adopted Jumby in February. He had been in the hospital 12 days to the start of May and was expected to be there through at least the middle of the month, maybe longer, for surgery. He is a special-needs child with cerebral palsy. He is also deaf and blind.
Tanis started her Redneck Mommy blog in February 2006, a few months after her biological son “Shalebug”, also a special-needs child with multiple disabilities, passed away in October 2005. When she launched the Redneck Mommy blog, she also launched Missing My Bug, a blog to mourn Bug. She started blogging after doing a lot of reading online about grief in the months after Bug’s death. She found a few blogs written by those who had lost others and really enjoyed them, so she decided to give it a try.
During the next few months Tanis wrote every day. In June, however, she walked away from the blogs as her struggle with the death of her son intensified and writing was no longer helping to ease the pain.
In September of that same year she returned to the blogs with plans to close them and decided to check email one last time. It was at that point that she discovered hundreds of emails from concerned readers asking where she was. She was surprised by the outpouring of support and decided to continue writing.
“I received support when I was at my very worst. I realized then that people cared and these friendships I made were real. It was eye opening,” she said.
Today she aims to write about three posts a week on Attack of the Redneck Mommy. She has since discontinued her grief blog. When she wants to write a sad post, she writes it on Redneck Mommy.
“I never rant. I never write angry posts. If there’s something on my mind I’ll try to make it inspirational. You laugh and cry on my site.”
Attack of the Redneck Mommy
Here’s a recent tear jerker:
There is nothing harder in the world than having to say good bye to your child. It is a pain no parent should ever know. Tears that should never be wept. We enter parenthood in good faith, with dreams of watching our children grow up and become parents themselves”. We moan and groan over potty training foibles and temper tantrums in the grocery store. We dread the teenage years and the rebellion we know which must surely follow. We never think of the possibility of not having another tomorrow with our child.
And here’s some comedy:
I am chronically lazy. At least this is what my children like to tell me whenever I ask them to fetch me a drink or take the garbage out. Generally while muttering under their breath about me possibly having a piano tied to my arse. While my bottom may be quickly growing to piano size proportions, last time I checked there was no musical instrument tied to my posterior. (Although, sometimes when I pass gas I swear there are trumpets and flutes strategically placed back there.)
Tanis, who lives in Alberta, Canada, said the Attack of the Redneck Mommy name originated from her childhood when her uncle used to call himself a redneck.
“I never knew what [the word] meant. I would always look at his neck to see if it was red,” she said.
An aspect of blogging that Tanis particularly enjoys is the community.
“I was always mystified by how people would discover my blog and link to me. It’s a big community and I’m really happy to be a part of it.”
She receives about 9,000 to 10,000 page views a day during the week and 5,000 a day on weekends. She runs a few ads on the site, and all of her advertising revenue goes to the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation in Edmonton, Alberta in memory of Bug.
She also is an advocate for parents with special-needs children and has written letters and made phone calls on behalf of those parents after they have reached out to her through her blog.
Tanis lost her son Bug when he was two months shy of his fifth birthday.
She also has two other children, a 12½-year-old daughter, named “Fric” on the blog, and an 11½-year-old son called “Frac.” Part of the reason that she started the blog was to document her feelings so that her kids could read about them when they get older.
“I mainly started [the blog] because I wanted to remember how to laugh and how to be happy. I wanted to show my kids that you can go through hardship and survive it ““ I did it and I made it.”
“I want my kids to have an inside window into who their mom and dad are” and the blog is a great way to do this, she said.
She respects and values her children’s privacy, giving them editorial control over anything she writes about them. If they don’t approve of something she’s written or a photo she wants to post, then it doesn’t go on the site. She said sometimes her daughter approves a photo on the condition that there’s a black bar across her eyes. Her kids are known only by their blog names.
Her husband, on the other hand, has no say in what she writes. She said he does read her posts, but he avoids the reader comments that follow. “Sometimes he just rolls his eyes and groans” after reading them, she said.
She and her husband had considered adopting a special-needs child when Bug was alive because they wanted him to have a companion, but when Bug died, they shelved those plans. They recently restarted the process and brought Jumby home on February 14.
“I wanted to raise my children with someone with special needs because [the experience] makes them into completely different people. I want them to know that there’s value in all types of life,” she said.
Tanis has been spending 10 hours a day, seven days a week with Jumby while he’s in the hospital.
She spends about 15 to 20 hours a week on the blog, including writing posts, reading email and comments, and reading other blogs. She said one of the biggest misconceptions about blogging is that it is easy. It can be a lot of work to keep the blog alive, she said, including consistently writing posts to let people know that you’re out there, and reading other blogs to network within the community.
In addition to writing, she often highlights new blogs or blogs of friends by linking to them within her posts, and she holds a “Weiner Week” once a year, when she calls out notable blogs written by men, a group she believes is underrepresented in the blogging community.
She said blogging can also be mentally draining. She has been called many names in nasty emails and even been ridiculed on a hate blog. As the mommy blogging community has expanded, she said, so has the number of trolls, and that is one thing she wishes would change. But she said her skin has gotten thicker as a result.
“I’m prepared to get a little mud thrown in my face,” she said. “For every 10 people that support me, there’s always one that doesn’t. It’s part of putting yourself out there. People need to know that it’s not all rainbows and unicorns.”
What has surprised her about the blogging community is the number of people who have reached out to her saying they lost children or were in some other way touched by grief.
“They thanked me for talking about it so honestly. It’s nice to be connected to somebody who knows the pain you’ve gone through.”
She said the positive side of blogging far outweighs the negative. It helps her stretch her creative muscle, it has led to valuable friendships globally and it has changed her for the better.
“It’s given me a lot of self confidence I didn’t have before. It’s totally opened up a world of friends all over the world that I travel to see. It’s all been for the best.”
