How To Cause Misery/ Why My Children Don't Deserve Me

1. Be on the guest list for a church-style celebration which involves adorning oneself in a manner befitting such a setting. Correction: Which involves explaining to and insisting upon one's offspring on dressing in such a manner as to not bring undue shame upon one's maternal head.
2. Have a family member who only wears one pair of pants, and only t-shirts with witty sayings upon them. Explain patiently and insistently that grandmothers in their seventies will not be amused to have these witticisms forever gracing their walls in the form of The Family Portrait.
3. Have a minimum of one pubescent offspring who reacts to any and all stimuli, suggestion, frustration, and gentle teaching as personally directed trauma to which there is only one possible reaction: tears, slams, sarcasm, and a subtle victim mentality worn as a dark and burdensome cloak.
4. Have a minimum of one genetic representative with numerous hangers clad in gorgeous fashion that you yourself have spent your hard-earned earnings on. Be utterly prepared to hear the following: Too floofy. Too drapey. Too dressy. Too beachy. Too wrong. And best of all: TAKE ME TO THE MALL!!
5. Have the will power not to break skin or crush molars as you suppress your rising, cresting, molten rage. Remind precious offspring that yesterday was spent in a mall. Remind offspring that you are a humble labourer incapable and unwilling to buy shares in adolescent fashion. Remind offspring that just yesterday the urgencies involved particular binders, thumb drives, running shoes, and even passport photos for an upcoming European fieldtrip.
6. Remind offspring that you brought them into this world and you can take them....... NO. Resist. Repress. Begin to break skin and crush molars.
7. Switch to boy clothes in an attempt to regain your centre.
8. Discover button-up shirts buried deep in the recesses of the closet.
9. Watch son steadily beat his head upon the edge of a doorway and tears well up in his pretty blue eyes.
10. Consider visiting the sick and infirm at a local hospital, seeking out victims of H1N1 and breathing deep, deep, deep, swallowing their sputum, rolling in their bedding, and sipping from their urinals in order to bring an alternative home to the family. Just a deadly case of the swine flu to keep us from the agony of resting the black pants, cut-offs, and sweatshirts for an entire, impossible day in a pew-lined sanctuary, all clogged up in buttons and zippers.
11. Either that, or slapping us all full of honey, and laying ourselves down in a field of red ants.