Someone at the Time Out for Women event in Philadelphia last weekend asked how she could help the "hard child" in her family feel loved. I took that question because I have always felt that every personality trait has two sides. My most stubborn children were also the ones who were really able to go after what they wanted, whereas the ones who seem now to kind of drift along and avoid making tough decisions were actually delightful and undemanding and easy to get along with as little children. One of the tricks to loving a "hard child," I think, is to be alert to the possible flip side of his or her more difficult personality traits. See if there might be something there that will serve that child well if it can be channeled.

But as I was thinking about answering this question, the image suddenly flashed into my mind of a picture my parents had hanging on the wall of the upstairs hall in our house. It was the "casual wall," where visitors rarely ventured, and one of the things hanging there was a cartoon-like, black-and-white rendition of a spitting cat. I asked my mom recently why they had chosen that, of all pieces, and she said that they had gotten it when I was a teenager because it reminded them so exactly of me.

WHAT? And here I thought I had been the "easy child." I got the good grades and obeyed the rules and never sneaked out at night or sluffed school except once when we went to lunch after we finished our AP English tests. Then I thought about all the times I had been sullen and sulky and grouchy. If I didn't feel like doing something, I could really behave like a martyr. And the dark side of a funny sense of humor is that you can be pointedly, even hurtfully sarcastic without much effort. I imagine there were lots of times when I was just plain hard to live with.

So I had to laugh when another woman came up to me after I spoke in Philadelphia and said, "Your husband is so lucky. Does he just love so much being married to you?" I couldn't help thinking, "Yeah, well what you saw was the good-girl side of my personality. He sees the spitting cat just as often." Isn't it crazy, and maybe a little backwards, that a lot of times we're more pleasant and kind to total strangers than we are to the people we supposedly love the most?

I'm going to watch out for that this week--a little more Funny Girl, a little less Spitting Cat. I bet my "lucky" husband could use the break!