[Witty Blogpost Title] [Audience Laughter]

My mother always told me to be nice: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” She never told me that sometimes nice people get taken advantage of. My mother always told me that I wasn’t a quitter, making me finish out the first, last, and worst soccer season of my entire life. (It was terrible when I was five, and it’s terrible now. Please, someone tell me, what is enjoyable about soccer, because it certainly isn't the "running" portion) She didn’t tell me that sometimes you have to give up on people who only aid in deteriorating your mental health; that sometimes you have to save yourself before saving someone else.

My mother never told me that other people have rules. I never really had a bedtime and no one told me to brush my teeth twice a day (I did anyway; don’t worry about my dental hygiene.) So when someone took away my independence, I was upset. (My babysitter didn’t believe me when I told her that I could go to bed whenever I wanted (9:30pm), watch whatever I wanted on TV (O, Brother Where Art Thou), and make whatever I wanted for dinner (Mac ‘n Cheese with hotdogs)) I wasn’t prepared for people to think of me as something other than responsible and independent enough to make my own decisions. I didn’t fit easily into submission and that wasn’t a problem for my mother,  as long as what I was doing wasn't hurting anyone else; it was a problem for other people who were upset when they couldn’t easily put me into a box. It became a problem for me when my decisions started to have effects on other people that I could see; there was a conflict of morals. What matters more: what I want to do, whether or not it's good for me, or how what I do will affect other people? It became a problem for me when I wasn’t confrontational and aggressive enough because I cared more about other people's reactions.

I remember one Easter there was an Easter Egg Hunt at the ski club. I cried because I didn’t get any eggs. It’s not that I hadn’t looked; I had let other people go ahead of me. I had let a boy push me into the snow, falling and getting up slowly instead of rising quickly and pushing him back, which I was more than capable of doing. I cried, and my father, merciless, yelled at me because I wasn't assertive enough.

My mother wanted me to be the kind of person that would make the world a better place, were the world to adopt my moral code. Last Thursday, she apologized for failing me, but it was the kind of apology where I was supposed to assure her that she hadn’t failed me. I didn’t tell her that she hadn’t failed me; I didn’t accept her apology. I didn’t say anything for a very long time. I was so angry and if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all, right? I took a deep breath. Then I told my mom that it was both of our faults, that I had never wanted to be helped. I wish I would have told her how no matter how hard she tried she would have failed me, that every child gets screwed up despite every good parent’s best effort and how that's not necessarily a bad thing. I wish I had told my mom that she had done her best and that I always knew she loved me. I wanted to say that we’re all so divergent, with so many different idiosyncrasies and neuroses, that there’s no way that any one child is going to be perfect. I want her to know that I’m a human, and the fact that she loves me unconditionally despite this makes her a much better mother than she thinks she is.