checks and balances

do you ever pay self-imposed taxes? a pound of flesh sitting on the scales of checks and balances?
even as a little girl, i believed that all good things come with a price. that there is a universal karmic balance, so to speak. if i did something wrong, if i lied or intentionally hurt someones feelings, i would mentally make a red check in the debit ledger. the next bad thing that happened to me? i drew a line through that check. a mental tally, so to speak.

bryan tells me i'm impossible to surprise. i will probe and ask pointed questions, i will work the situation over and over in my head until i reach some kind of conclusion. perhaps it's learned. there were aspects of my childhood that were so well hidden from public view, i learned never to trust the surface. people are only as good as their word when they're telling the truth. the result, however, is that even the good surprises are hard to hide from me. it's one of my weaker qualities.

have you ever watched a human being develop cognitive thinking skills right in front of you? there you are, eating what most definitely falls into the top five of all sandwiches you've ever eaten, as your man explains to your two and a half year old that showing each other the chewed up food in our mouths (while gross and hilarious) is bad manners. fifteen minutes later she attempts to wipe her yogurt smeared face on the curtains and you stop her. you explain she will get food on the curtains.
she giggles.
bad manners, mommy. bad manners, daddy.
you and the man you created this human with look across the table at each other.
because you realize she just put two and two together and for some reason she knew it was four.
i suppose i'm not that hard to surprise after all.
flesh and balance and bad manners lined up all in a row.