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So you think you can do it better...

"I have it all figured out", I once mistakenly avowed to a group of veteran parents, which included my mother. They got a good laugh out of that. My father always reminds me that being a parent does not come with instructions (his way of admitting he was not perfect, I am sure). And as my apparently amusing comment implies, every new parent thinks they can do it better than their own.

I can often hear my mother snickering during some of my more challenging parenting moments. She is rarely actually around when I hear these outburst. It is as if she has planted them in my head for her own amusement and revenge. And when she is around, she is silent but expressive with only that "I told you so" smirk on her face.

The first chuckle came when my first born arrived. It was not until the moment she came out that we knew she was a girl. "You're in for it now", she said only with her eyes and that smirk! I, myself, had trepidation toward raising a girl who was half me. By now I was old enough to have accepted most of the blame for my tumultuous teen years, but not all of it. There was a very legitimate spark that fueled my unruly fire-gender bias.

They disguised this during the early years as age discrimination, "you can do these things too, when you're older". This is a hard pill to swallow for a younger sibling, but certainly more justified and reasonable than this reality I would soon discover.

Mark was four years older than me. I remember him, at 17 years old, being carried into our house by my father after my parents received a phone call from another parent that their boys had been drinking and Mark was passed out at their house. This was the beginning of trend that would lead to, sleepovers at his girlfriends house as he was to drunk to drive home, family portraits with an obviously hung-over son, his stale-beer-stenched bedroom that required his door to remain closed at all times, and some pot hazed, booze filled, holes in the walls, parent-free bashes at our house . These parties went undetected, or at least unmentioned. Boys will be boys. So imagine my surprise when I would have a party and my mother would launch an all-out investigation into my guilt.

I once came home to my mother standing in the kitchen with a list of grocery items that were missing, surely eaten at the party which she had now gathered enough evidence to prove I had. There was a plastic cutting board in the kitchen that did not survive my mother's rage that

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