"You Like Being Mean to Us. You're Nothing But a Hatred Machine."

Thus sayeth Sophie, age 10. Thank God those words were directed to her father, and not to me.

That would make a great book title. "You're nothing but a hatred machine." She's a damn fine writer, that girl. She's got a terrific sense of language and a good eye for detail.

This terrifies me.

I can see it now. The tell-all memoir in which she writes about the miseries of growing up with a mother who wrote chatty little mystery novels about being a mommy, but was secretly an evil wretch, locking her daughter in closets and denying her food and clothing. Well, denying her chocolate bars for breakfast and midriff-baring tops from Limited Too, but you get the point. She'll describe how she awoke at age six months to witness the primal scene and has never recovered. She'll list the various drugs her mother ingested, both legal and less so.

Her memoir will be titled something like "Co-Dependent No More." Or, "In Your Face, You Bitch."

I wish she had the remotest talent in something else, so I could channel her energies to something that wouldn't come back to bite me in the butt. Sadly, her violin playing is, well, let's just say that it is at the precise pitch and tone of the whistle on my tea kettle and whenever she practices I come tearing into the kitchen to turn off the burner on the stove. She loves musical theater, but she sings as well as I do, and I was one of the people required to mouth the words to the Christmas carols in chorus.

Math. She's really good at math. Maybe I'll enroll her in some upper level math programs. Great mathematicians rarely turn to memoir.