High Maintenance

I really, really hope that my mother doesn't read this week's post, as I know whatever I end up confessing, she would remind me of about 500 additional incidents that caused her to pull out her hair.

My mother always referred to me as her "high-maintenance child" because I was colicky as n infant and strong-willed as a toddler and beyond. She has since eaten these words, after raising my siblings who have totaled three cars, gotten brought home by the police, had our house t.p.-ed, and so on. "High-maintenance" sounds pretty good right about now, huh?

Of course, I had my fair share of difficult moments as a child. If my mom said up, I said down. She suggested I wear pants to school, and I'd only want to wear a dress. Sometimes I think I argued with her just for the sake of challenging her and to see if her head would pop off due to frustration. Like the time when I was in kindergarten and she brought me to a fancy department store and told me not to touch anything. I responded by knocking over a mannequin and shattering it into a million pieces. That one wasn't on purpose. I think.

And as a teenager, I had my fair share of "I'll just say I'm sleeping over at a friend's house" and missed curfews. Then, when I entered college, I decided to get a tattoo. Her reaction of, "That's nice" was somewhat anti-climactic.

But as I've said before, everything I did that my parents thought was terrible has been either matched or completely overshadowed by my two brothers and sister. Yet my mother still calls me her difficult child, despite never having crashed their car into the side of the garage and then pretended that the huge dent just "appeared overnight." Ahem.

A few years ago, I had my own high-maintenance child. My mother smiled and sat back, happy with the knowledge that karma is truly a great thing.