Oh, I'm so smart, with all my big ideas and opinions, and I'm the first one to have ever had them.

I like to think of God smiling when, at eighteen, I proclaimed that marriage was nothing but a tax break and a piece of paper, all the while quietly getting this fantastic guy ready for the rest of my life. And then, when I talked about not wanting kids, I'm sure God and my Bug chuckled together up in heaven.

I bet I'm cute when I get all huffy.

Life was so much easier when I was thrashing around in my sad little adolescent darkness, torturing my mother with suicide threats. It was a simpler time, when I could hate my family, when I prayed in anguish to be surrounded by better people with fewer faults. It sucks intensely to wake up human, morning after morning, with no one to blame, a dozen people to worry yourself sick over, and a bathroom to clean.

Okay, I tell God, I've gotten married, I've had the kid, you win. But I'm only having one. This is my big plan, and I'm sticking to it, dammit: one kid only, and then maybe adoption, if we suddenly find ourselves millionaires.

Sometimes God in my mind is this lady, knitting in a rocking chair, knitting out the scarf of my life. Me, the scarf, I'm barking out orders about what color I want to be, how this or that color will clash, but all I can see is the row I'm in. And God just keeps rocking and knitting, adding color and, if I whine too much, maybe shushing a little, the way I do when The Bug halfway wakes from a nap.