Is it possible to be embarrassed twenty years after the fact? I was cleaning out old boxes and found the autobiography that my middle daughter had written in the sixth grade. I call it the "expose." She tells all. It could compete with "Mommy Dearest" if I were a dead movie star. On one page, my daughter spews, "My mom yells at my dad a lot unless she wants him to do something like take out the trash. Then she calls him handsome, good-looking or muscles."

The more I read the more I sunk back into the corner of the attic, determined not to show my face around here again. How many people did the teacher share this with? The principal? The Health and Welfare authorities? There was also mention of the time that I locked the children in the backyard so that I could finish cleaning the house completely before they started messing it up again. It really wasn't ten o'clock at night in a blizzard with no caps or boots or food. It was summer. Honest. They had a swing set, a sandbox, a playhouse and a picnic lunch. Of course it's my word against theirs and there are five of them. Just send some food to the attic once in a while and pretend I'm that relative no one talks about. At least she received an "A" on the assignment. I'm sure that it was worth the humiliation. That teacher always gave me a strange look when the rest of my children reached her class.