Darn Mirror.

Allison. My child who is most like me. Therefore it is inevitable that I will have days where finding my own, occasionally not so pleasant, attributes reflected back at me might rub me the wrong way. Today for instance, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Sleep deprived and unable to find a thing that fit to wear to Bible Study, I was snappy and surly from the get go. While I was wrestling Ben into his third pair of jeans (Why does that boy have to keep growing?) Allison sulked into the room in her robe. It was about twenty minutes before the bus was expected.

"All my jeans are too tight. I don't have anything to wear."

"How can they be too tight?" I snapped. "You just wore them last week!"

"Well they were too tight last week too."

"Well, I'm sorry, but you are going to have to figure something out. Now is not the time to tell me this."

We bantered back and forth about this for a minute until Allison finally wailed, "I don't have anything to wear and YOU DON'T EVEN CARE!" I am telling you, it was the perfect stereotype of a whiny hormonal teenage girl.

"No." I responded, stonefaced. "I don't. It's fifteen minutes before your bus comes. I don't care a bit. You can tell me about this again this afternoon. I might care then."

Allison stormed weeping from the room. She went downstairs and found some capris and made it onto the bus on time. I felt pretty self-righteous about the whole thing too, thinking 'She really had a lot of nerve bringing this to me in the morning. Especially this morning when I was already in such a bad mood. I hardly got any sleep. And then to make matters worse, not a single pair of jeans fit...'

Yep. It took me that long to figure out we were both upset about the exact same thing. Crap, I hate being a hypocrite.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. ~Mark Twain