Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.

“I warn you dear child, if I lose my temper, you lose your head. Understand?”
–the Queen of Hearts


My mother tried in vain to raise my sisters and I to grow into delicate, proper young women. Her attempts, through lists of forbidden television shows, movies, words, behaviors and even friends, went entirely ignored and overlooked. Poor Claire. When I was younger, it seemed like everything posed a threat to my mom’s difficult job of keeping us sheltered, over-protected and literally in the dark to any of life’s harsh realities. Now that I’m older, and my mom has entirely given up on her dream of proper young women, I’ve realized how hard this job was. And how hard we made it for her. In our defense, my mom should have taken a good look at the three disheveled, loud and sassy chicks she had eating fruit loops at the breakfast table with her, and given up then.

But give up, she did not. I remember vividly my childhood attempts of getting my mom to break out of her blazer-clad, pearl-wearing shell. The first attempt, when I was six, went something like this:

Me: “Mommy, what’s the difference between a boy and a girl?”
Mommy (looking shocked, disgusted and appalled): “Caitlin, don’t be crude, you know that answer.”

A couple years later, my attempts were getting bolder:

Me: “Mom, what’s a hooker?”
Mom: “A lady of the night! Keep walking!”

These colorful memories are the things we belly laugh about together around the dining room table now. I’ve asked my mom many times if she realized that for a large part of my childhood, every time she took my sisters and I out at night, I thought the four of us were hookers?

I can’t blame my mom for trying her hardest to shelter us from reality. Just like she can’t blame us for growing into opinionated, strong-willed, vivacious girls. And why would she? It’s probably the happiest mistake of her life. Unfortunately, there is one tiny aspect that I don’t think either of my parent’s banked on when raising us: our tempers. More specifically, our crappy tempers.

My mom is a fiery redhead. There are only a couple things in life she will lose it about. These include someone leaving an almost-empty container of chocolate ice cream in the freezer, messy bedrooms and anyone fucking with her kids. Just one of these assaults on my mom’s world is enough for the air in the room to turn chilly, and make you run for your cardigan sweater. (Just don’t fuck with one of her kids, while eating the majority of her chocolate ice cream, in the middle of a messy bedroom.)

Otherwise, Claire is one calm, cool and collected chick. In fact, she loses her cool so rarely that I only consider her fiery because of her gorgeous red hair and the deep love she has for the people in her life.

So this leaves me wondering, where the FUCK did I get my temper?

Gee, thanks Dad.