Southern Fried Momma

Some­times I lose track of time while sit­ting here in front of the com­puter try­ing to decide upon a post that deserves to be the Post of the Day. It hap­pened again this evening after I hap­pened upon South­ern Fried Momma. And at one point, I was laugh­ing so hard that my old­est child came out of his bed­room to see what was caus­ing me to shriek with laugh­ter to the point that tears were run­ning down my cheeks, I was hav­ing trou­ble catch­ing my breath, and I lit­er­ally snorted a cou­ple of times.

Meet the woman respon­si­ble: Dejoni. She describes her­self as “30-ish bot­tle blond” cling­ing to her “san­ity and youth by [her] fin­ger­tips.” Her goal? To “raise my chil­dren right like my par­ents raised me. I try to have it all together but fail mis­er­ably.” And her con­fes­sions about her self-professed fail­ures are hilar­i­ous.

Dejoni, her hus­band, and their two daugh­ters, Rachel and Ella, live on the “Red­neck Riv­iera.” Trans­la­tion: In the coun­try. Ken­tucky, to be exact. Ten miles from things city-dwellers take for granted, such as gro­cery stores and work­places. They lead a glam­orous life to be sure, char­ac­ter­ized by dis­cern­ing palates: “And yes, we eat bologna … the poor man’s steak … and we like LOVE it. Some­times we get a lit­tle fancy … fry it and serve it on Chinet instead of cheap foam paper plates.” And cul­ture: On the third week­end in Sep­tem­ber, they attend Cow Days where “the big high­light for the kids is to gather around ‘Annie,’ the large fiber­glass cow, and ‘milk’ her for Kool-Aid.” And which mer­its, of course, a Round-Up post about the fes­ti­val that com­mem­o­rates “all things cow.”

And, of course, the happy cou­ple expe­ri­ence Red­neck Romance:

“How does enjoy­ing a nice Caber­net Sauvi­gnon, steak. cheese and a roman­tic evening become this?” asked Dejoni.

The Post of the Day is, how­ever, A new low, even for me. You have to read it to appre­ci­ate it. And if you are a work­ing par­ent, you will find your­self expe­ri­enc­ing a vari­ety of emo­tions, includ­ing amuse­ment, com­pas­sion, and empa­thetic guilt. Dejoni’s babysit­ter assured her that “some­times a momma’s gotta do what a momma’s gotta do; and [Dejoni] told her that’s exactly how we roll, keep­ing it real in Hooterville.”

The beauty of Dejoni’s writ­ing about her day-to-day strug­gles and joys is decep­tively obvi­ous: She is a twenty-first cen­tury “every­woman,” a modern-day Erma Bombeck, a southern-based vari­a­tion on Gar­ri­son Keil­lor. As she blogs about life in Hooter­ville where, on some days, she sur­vives it all only through Divine Inter­ven­tion or the “Cus­tom Deluxe” red­neck truck her hus­band bought, she is speak­ing our all of our lives. Only the geog­ra­phy and names are dif­fer­ent. She is blog­ging about life in a quin­tes­sen­tially Amer­i­can fam­ily. We can all relate to her tales of domes­tic tribu­la­tions because we’ve expe­ri­enced our own as we keep it real in our own home towns just as she keeps it real in Hooter­ville. For that rea­son, Dejoni is truly a “national trea­sure” and it is fit­ting that she receive the Post of the Day Award on the brink of the most Amer­i­can of all cel­e­bra­tions, the Fourth of July.

Con­grat­u­la­tions, Dejoni!

Tech­no­rati Tags: Post of the Day Award, South­ern Fried momma, The Ris­ing Blogger

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