She never said 'I told you so.'

I was the kind of kid that could sit for hours on the floor with my Barbie dolls and My Little Ponies, making up stories about what they were doing. Inspired by Laura Ingalls Wilder books, I imagined my Barbies were making a caravan trek across golden fields (it helped that the carpet in my room was a goldenish brown).

The problem was that the My Little Ponies were always too small for Barbie and her friends to ride and, duh, everybody knows horses don't really come in pink and purple with pictures of rainbows and raindrops tattooed on their hips. (Actually, I dunno. Chris, do some ranches brand their horses with raindrops and rainbows?)

So when I caught a glimpse of the pink box with the Barbie Brand Horse in the closet where Mom kept all her old purses and steamy romance novels out of reach, I immediately pitched a convincing argument for why I needed to have it. In other words, I threw a tantrum.

"I'll give it to you later," Mom said. "When you're older. Otherwise you'll break it. You break everything."

This is an exaggeration, but like all exaggerations based on some truth.

Mom had given me a pair of vintage troll dolls (the small ones, not the big plush ones that became popular years later) with felt vests. I immediately lost the vests and misplaced one entire troll. (The one with the magenta hair. I always liked the one with the yellow hair better anyway.) Then there were the numerous occasions I somehow yanked Barbie's head off and had to have Dad fix it. Once he had to pop Ken's leg back in too. There's the slinky I tangled up so badly that no one, not even Dad, fixer of all things, could untangle it. But what kind of kid doesn't tangle a slinky?

So I pitched the tantrum at the end of the hallway. It was quite a tantrum, full of screaming and tears and foot stamping. The kind of tantrum I only dared to throw when Dad was not home.

And Mom gave in and gave me the horse. It was brown and white and plastic all over and came with a saddle and, yea!, something new for Barbie and me to do!

Within a week I broke half of it's front leg, the one that was raised and bent to make it appear as though the horse was in mid-trot.

I was just a kid but even I realized the consequences of breaking the horse's leg within a week of throwing a tantrum because Mom warned me I would break the horse.

So I tied the broken part of the leg back on with a piece of Kleenex and limited Barbie's horse adventures to my closet until I eventually outgrew interest in the horse and moved on to pitching tantrums about other things.

My mom must have eventually realized what happened but I don't remember her ever saying "I told you so."

Come to think of it, Mom really must've been trying to hide that horse from me. She'd put it high up in the closet, above all her old purses, above even the steamy romance novels.