Temper Tantrums - He Said / She Said

It's true – I was once the three-year-old wild child melting down in the cookie aisle. In fact, I'm pretty sure I cleared an entire shelf of neatly arranged cookie boxes after my mom said "No". Her continued refusal to pick them up from the floor and put them into our cart elicited screams so piercing that shoppers actually came from other aisles to see what was happening.

It must have been incredibly tempting for my mother to walk away, or to give in to me to avoid further embarrassment. And unfortunately, that wasn't my only tantrum. There were days during my growing up years that I drove her to literal migraines.

And today? I'm forever in her debt for her consistent intervention at such a young age. It would have been so much easier for her to excuse my behavior in the moment; yet she sacrificed her time and energy to stop me from developing habits of selfishness that would have been detrimental to me for the rest of my life. Because I was so strong willed, I cannot imagine the monster I would have become if I had been allowed to carry that behavior into adulthood. I am confident that, at minimum, I would have been neither marriageable nor employable!

The woman I am today is a direct result of the effort that my parents put in to training me, and I am more grateful to them than words can express.