Question: What is evil and cruelty personified? Answer: Me

According to my dear daughter, I would give Snow White's stepmother a run for her money. I am cruel, mean and evil, and I wouldn't know how to help somebody who came up to me begging for it. I am, apparently, what makes her life so very miserable. Yes, I did it.

I asked her to clean up her room.

Oh, the humanity! And well you might gasp out, "What sort of monster asks this of a child? What sort of foul ichor runs sluggishly through her veins that she has the intestinal fortitude to request a small girl do something so very distasteful, so very, dare I say, WRONG!?" Is she a reptile, devoid of the normal warmth a mother's heart has for her offspring? Are her emotions stunted? Is she unable to dredge up even a modicum of feeling for this little girl, who wants nothing more than to simply live a life of constant fun and excitement and absolutely no chores or obligations whatsoever?

Yeah, that'd be me.

I know there are those of you out there who may well remember my own fights with my mother about this selfsame thing. What I'm TRYING to do here is get her used to keeping a relatively tidy room BEFORE she becomes so firmly entrenched in her slobbiness that she turns into me. I don't think it's working so well, yet.

You. Do. NOT! Mess. With. My. Kid. I don't care if you're only 6.

I am an avowed pacifist. I gently transport spiders from the corners of my home to the back patio, where I set them on the ground or in a bush, even though they litter my floor with the dry husks of roly-polies. If I see an earthworm on the sidewalk after a rain, I put it in the grass. I catch the geckos who run into the house each summer and send them back outside where there's a better chance of getting food. (Although, come to think of it, the spiders are really chowing down, so there must be a portal to Roly-Polyville somewhere in the house, and I guess a gecko wouldn't do too badly, assuming he's a roly-polyvore, like the spiders.) My list of things it is okay to kill includes: 1. mosquitoes, 2. fire ants, 3. cockroaches, if you can't chase them out of the house. I even allowed the maggots who were raining down on my head from the air duct in the bathroom to live (albeit in my garbage can.) Scorpions? Let them live. Snakes? Rats? Sure! All of this is to say that I am not a violent girl. Not usually. However, a new factor has been added to the mix, and it is about as popular as a cold sore. 4. Anyone who hurts Zoe.

I mean hurt emotionally, as well as physically. Hell, if they look at her cross-eyed, I want to disembowel them. But all that has been, until now, purely theoretical. But as of this afternoon, all bets are off. Somebody is fixin' to get a big old serving of Whoop Ass.

To begin at the beginning, when Zoe started school last year, there were only three girls (including her) in the class, and they became good friends. However, near the end of the year, one of the girls (for the sake of anonymity, let's just call her Fuckface,) had a birthday party and didn't invite Zoe. Now, actually, this wasn't a problem. It quickly BECAME a problem when Fuckface went around the classroom, pointing at people and saying, "You're invited, you're NOT invited. . ." At that point, she was clearly looking to get shivved, but I held back. At least I didn't have to buy her a present.

We thankfully didn't have to see her this summer, but at the beginning of this year, while Zoe and Fuckface were playing with some other children outside after school, Fuckface kneed Zoe in the crotch. Fuckface's father (for the sake of anonymity, let's just call him Microdick,) upon seeing Zoe crying in pain, sighed, looked at Fuckface, and said, "Say you're sorry, Fuckface," to which she mumbled something under her breath that I couldn't hear. He told her again, and again, she mumbled something so quiet I didn't hear it. When he tried a third time, she yelled in his face, "I ALREADY APOLOGIZED TWICE, WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT ME TO DO!?" That was pretty much the end of it. Apparently, for Microdick, that was enough of an apology. He led her away, and mumbled his own apology to Zoe as he passed by. The next day, peeing was painful. Again, it occurred to me that I wouldn't mind if my car accidentally tapped her in the parking lot (and then again as I backed up to see what I'd tapped.)

Still, I held my tongue.

However! Today, another mother from the class (for the sake of anonymity, let's just call her Queen PerfectSuperMom) took me aside and told me that her daughter (for the sake of anonymity, let's just call her Princess Wonderful) had walked by Fuckface's desk and saw Fuckface's notebook open to a page with Zoe's name written on it. Princess Wonderful said to Fuckface, "Why do you have Zoe's name written and not mine? I thought we were friends." To which Fuckface replied, "I'm making a list of all the bad things I want to happen to Zoe." Princess Wonderful immediately said, "Zoe's my friend!" and walked away. She then told her mother. I love this child. And I love this mother, who, upon hearing the story, told the teacher, the teacher's assistant, the Head of School, another mother and another teacher. She even put the whole incident in writing and submitted it to the Head of School, because they need it in writing to do anything about it. I later accosted the Head of School in the foyer and she said that there would most likely be a meeting with Fuckface tomorrow morning, after which they'd decide if the parents needed to be called in. I was good with that, but later this evening as I was thinking about it, I think the parents need to be called no matter what Fuckface says tomorrow.

Isn't that a warning sign? Don't the kids who shoot up their classmates with submachine guns have lists like that?

I had a really good idea this afternoon, but a friend talked me down from the ledge. I was going to corner Fuckface when nobody was looking, get right in her face, and say, "I hate you. And if I were you, I'd watch out." She didn't think it was appropriate, just because Fuckface is only 6. I don't care if you're a FETUS! Don't mess with my kid! PERIOD! Just DON'T! Because, as she and her idiot parents are about to find out, my niceness is only a facade! Underneath this soccer mom exterior, I am a seething mass of rage and evil, just waiting for the chance to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Now is my chance! Yeah, I may go straight to hell, but I'll take that little bitch with me.

Whew. That felt good.

The Halloween photo

So I finally gave up all illusions of morphing into Martha Stewart overnight and reproducing in excruciating detail every bit of the actual Cleopatra's outfit and came up with something appropriate, tasteful and easily identifiable. I stuffed it with a breathtakingly gorgeous kid, and here's what we got.

Queen of Denial
(yeah, an obvious joke, but oh, so true)

Guilt

Today, a Saturday, the Girl has a birthday party to go to. Zach is taking her so I can sit home and finish off the last of my homework and get everything turned in. And I feel guilty. The last 12 weeks I have been more of an absent mother than usual, what with all the time supporting my dog habit with hours spent on the computer. I should have more of a Girl habit, and I feel awful that I haven't, right now. Also feeling guilty that I never learned to roller skate, so I'd feel like a dork taking her to the party anyway, being as how I'd have to crawl on my hands and knees.

So I get to be a mother again in a week or so. Will I be good at it? We'll see.

Satan has icicles on his butt

Yes, hell has indeed frozen over. You all will have a new appreciation for the wonders and weirdnesses this world has when I tell you that, when this semester is over for me (which is on November 16th,) I will take some time to CLEAN MY WHOLE HOUSE.

Because I, the kid/girl/woman who has never once cleaned anything on purpose, I have become disgusted with that has happened to this place in the past 10.5 weeks, since school started. To say I've had little time to do anything but study is an understatement. Zoe is lucky she's still alive, that I've had the time to feed her. Zach and I are reduced to writing notes to each other to communicate. I'm making myself sick with the stress (literally!) and ended up crying in the bathroom at work the other day. I've gained 15 pounds (don't most people LOSE weight when their guts are all tangled up? Not me. . . lucky!)

But I'm beginning to know what I'm doing. (And it only took 3.5 years!) I can run a urinalysis, test for heartworm, do fecal floats and smears (yes, they're as fun as they sound!) I can prepare a dog for surgery, draw blood from the teensy vein on a cat's back leg, and put in an IV catheter. I can recover animals coming out of surgery, and run/monitor anesthesia for those still in it. I can administer IV, IM and SC injections and take radiographs of any body part there is. I can develop the films. I can differentiate one leukocyte from another, and do an absolute count from a blood smear. And tomorrow, I'm going to intubate for the first time.

The question on everyone's mind at this point should be, "Is it worth it?"

Is it? There are days I would have said "Hell, no." But I'd be lying.