Sticks and stones

My daughter hates me. That's what she tells me on a regular basis, anyway. I don't let it bother me because I'm pretty sure she doesn't mean it -- she hates what I'm doing at that moment, not me -- but people who hear her say it tend to leap to my defense. I mostly just say, "I don't think that's true," and it's not, and it's our little joke. So the other day, when she really wanted to cut me down, she had to dig a little bit deeper into her bag of middle-school insults. And this is what she came up with: "Mom, you are not cool." Ooooh, burn. She kept saying it with ascending levels of scorn, waiting, I guess, for me to crumble into pieces over the public revelation of my uncoolness, but no; I just kept doing whatever geeky thing I was doing, making it worse by laughing at her insults. I'm a hard nut to crack, alright. She'll have to stock up on much worse stuff than that when she goes back to school to really ruffle my feathers.