My mother is one of those compulsive types. Her house always looks beautiful, but she's constantly fussing over it, rethinking this and rearranging that. Nothing stays where it is for a week straight. By contrast, my husband and I have lived in this house for a year and a half, and not once has anything been rearranged. When a picture gets hung, it stays where we put it, instead of being moved from here to there until it looks just right, the way my mother does. And the same applied to the mobile home we lived in before we bought this house. I think we lived there four years, and we never rearranged a thing.

As a kid, when we redecorated the house, did I have any say over the colors of my bedroom? Nope. All her choice. I was only 12. What did I know? Today I watch those home redesign shows on HGTV, and I see the designer redoing a kid's room and asking the kid what he/she likes. Hahahahaha. Didn't happen in my childhood. That's why the room my sister and I shared was done in browns, golds, and yellows. To this day my mother prefers those colors. But I never did. I would have wanted blues, greens, and violets, but she didn't care what I wanted. Even if we were only fantasizing about "the house we'd like to move into some day," if I described how I wanted my room to look, she'd criticize it as not fitting in to the rest of the house. It all had to be about what she liked, to hell with everyone else's tastes.

Never mind it being impossible to keep a room picked up if my sister lives in it, if I was a bit lackadaisical myself about keeping the room clean, it was because I didn't feel it was "my" space. It was hers. I just slept there. And if anyone were to question my mother about this, I can just see her mouth dropping open in shock that anyone would see anything wrong with the way she did it. "But you were a child, and I was your mother. Of course you didn't get a say. Children are supposed to do as their parents tell them to do."

OK, so why did I end up having to move thousands of miles away to get her to stop feeling entitled to rearrange and redecorate my house, without my permission, after I'm an adult and living in my own place instead of with her? In fact I was well into my forties and she was still "gifting me" with things to redecorate my place, without giving me a say. Those things were in her taste, not mine. Then she had the gall to tell me I should thank her for the service, instead of complaining about it. Well, to her credit, she almost did call it OCD by name. "I don't know how to stop."