Sticks and Stones

Kids. They say the darndest things. I don’t mean when they are little and mix up the letters in “spaghetti” or shorten “fire truck” down to the first and last three letters. Those little kid words are charming and adorable, but my kids are older now. Their vocabularies and abilities to wound you to your very core are very advanced compared to the naïve three year old. Here’re a few of my personal favorites I’ve been trying to store in my long term memory in case I need them for blackmail purposes later on in life.

Most moms get to experience the joy of their teenager saying “I hate you” at some point during the adolescent years. My teen is more specific than that. A year or so ago, she said to me,” You suck all the fun out of life.” That’s a pretty precise response to my asking her to do something as banal as make her bed or put her shoes away, don’t you think? Over the holiday break, she told me that “I am an awful person.” This one might have been in response to me telling her to put on a jacket or that she couldn’t have any more soda. Hitler was an awful person.  Genghis Khan was an awful person. Ted Bundy was an awful person, even if attractive, charismatic, and misunderstood. Seriously, am I really as bad as Attila the Hun?

My younger daughter has also said some pretty terrible things to me, but less about me as a person and more about my physical characteristics. Hers weren’t meant to be hurtful, more just descriptive to a fault. When she was younger and I cared less about being naked in front of her, she spent a long time studying my breasts before she said to me, “Your nipples look like the ends of hot dogs.” I should have told her it was all her fault for not weaning like a regular baby, but instead I went in the bathroom and locked the door, then sat down to have a little cry. I’m sure she meant that as a compliment, as she still loves hot dogs to this day, but I can’t look at a package of franks without feeling a kindred spirit with them, and also a hefty dose of self-loathing.

More recently, she put her hand on my belly and told me she loved it because it reminded her of a water bed, the way it rolled and squished. And she meant it as a compliment. In fact, she still didn’t understand how that could have hurt my feelings, even after my husband and other daughter went on and on about why it was such a horrible thing to say about my flabby abdomen despite hours spent at the gym.

 Yes, that’s me. Hot dog nippled and waterbed bellied, a fun-hating terrible excuse for a human. Is there any wonder why I have self-esteem issues? Here I am trying to build up my children, while at the same time, they are tearing me down.

 And no, this is not retribution for how I treated my mother as a child, because she deserved it.