This whole thing with Anja moving out was very odd. She just decided, very calmly, without any prior incident, that it was time for her to move out. No anger, no hysterics, no confrontation. But she couldn’t be talked out of this. The only time she’d get upset is when we asked why, and then she’d get very sad, her eyes would well up with tears, and she’d tell us she couldn’t take it anymore.

I was concerned about why she would say she couldn’t take it, was it something someone said or did to her? No, it was that she couldn’t handle us getting her in trouble all the time.

Anja is hard to describe to people who have never lived with her for more than a couple of weeks. She has been a handful her whole life; I posted on a messageboard when she was barely a week old that she was going to be a handful. And that she was. As a baby, she cried about things constantly. Not colicky crying for no reason. There usually was a reason, she just reacted to it so dramatically. When I nursed her at night before she started sleeping through, the only way she would be able to go back to sleep was if she was holding my finger. If I took away my hand, she would start squirming, and then fussing, and then crying.

When she got a little older, she would start having tantrums, ones that were very hard to control. Ones where she would scream, not cry but scream, and she would throw herself to the ground, would hit herself, would hit us. These tantrums weren’t limited to the safety of our home, either - she would do these things any time we didn’t do what she wanted. It took a couple of years to stop her from hitting herself and screaming for hours on end about as small a thing as not being able to pick up the cat.

She’s always been very mischievous; sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s cool, but many times it’s stuff that isn’t OK with us. Drawing on her brand new dresser with permanent marker. Using a rubber stamp all over her rug in her bedroom. Wearing her feria dress on her bike and ripping it up. Destroying something Isak had been working on building. Picking up the cat by the neck. Writing in our books. Drawing on the back of important papers. Stealing our money to use in a vending machine. The list goes on and on and on and on. And she almost always gets sent to her room when she does something like this, and this does not make the princess happy. At all.

She usually gets hysterical, but lately whenever this happens, she screams about how she can’t take it anymore. How she can’t handle it, how she’s always doing naughty things and we’re catching her, and she can’t take it.

And so she decided the other day she was just going to have to run away. When we talked about it and she realized that pretty much wherever she goes, any family would have rules, she decided then she’d just move to the unoccupied housing unit next door.

We talked about her plan, and much like she has a plan for just about everything, she had this all thought out. She’d take her clothes and some toys with her, and when she got hungry, she’d just come back home and eat here. Great plan!

The draw to living on her own was that there would be no rules and she could do whatever she want. Which led to the discussion of laws. And how when you’re in the safety of your home as a child, you don’t really have to follow laws, but once you’re an adult, you have to abide by the big, important laws. Like what?, she asked. Well, like paying taxes and not killing people and behaving yourself. All that was completely acceptable to her but then came the final, crushing blow.

“And you have to be 18 to live on your own.”

The next day came and when I came home from work, I asked very nonchalantly why she was still living here, wasn’t she moving out today? She shrugged and said, “Nah. I’m not 18 yet.”

I guess we’ll go over all this again in 11 years - hopefully by then she won’t still be rubber stamping her rugs, or if she is, she’s selling them as art on ebay.