Holy crap!

If I turn that in, I will have child services knocking on our door again!

I crumble the paper and start on a new sheet titled "Mom Taught Me To Use Make Up".

Mom always made my training a little bit more fun.

Dad always had less patience and expected me to understand what he taught after only a few moments, but Mom would always speak calmly and make sure I understood before we moved on.

One summer I asked mom if she could show me how to do make up like hers.

For a moment, she seemed prideful as she shot my father a teasing glance and blew a raspberry at him.

I always noticed, even in the earlier years of grade school, how all the girls seemed to know exactly what to do with their faces, and when I asked them how, they always said their mothers taught them.

Mom came into the room lugging a huge chest that looked like it belonged on a pirate ship rather than our living room.

When she opened it, the things inside looked nothing like the stuff I saw the other girls wearing at school, instead I saw wigs, fake noses, and what looked like clay of all different colors.

I gave my mom a confused glance to which she grabbed a wig, some clay, and a bulky suit of some kind, and gestured for me to wait.

After less than a minute, Dad walked into the room and sat on the couch.

"Where's your mother?" he asked, giving me a stern look.

"I don't know, she said to wait here," I shrugged, still pretty confused as I just stood there in the middle of the living room.

"Listen, Chelsea. I don't think you should train with her," he said, much to my surprise.

"Why not?!"

"Because, if she teaches you how to fight like she does than you will see that her family's way is far better than my crappy beat-'em-up karate garbage."

I stood there utterly shocked by my father's words...until he walked into the room.

I did a double take, expecting Mom and not another Dad, as he glared at his doppelganger.

My child brain felt like it was short circuting!

"You know I hate when you use my face for your stupid make up act!" Dad grumbled from the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest.

"If I had to see your ugly face when I walked into a room, I would hate it, too," other Dad said from the couch before ripping his face off to reveal my mother's.

I had a million questions about what I just saw and I fired them all at once.

"How did you copy Dad's face, hair, voice, muscles--" I started to ask before I ran out of breath.

"Let me show you rather than tell you, Chelly," Mom smiled as Dad left the room.

"Stop using my face!" he called from down the hall.

The next day, Mom said we would take our make up lesson for a test, which for most girls would mean a trip to the mall to pick up boys, but I was only half right.

I was still pretty confused when she brought two bags of her make up to the mall with her.

"Are you ready for a game, Chelsea?" she asked with a mischievous grin from ear to ear.

"What kind of game...?" I asked a bit nervously, but my naive young mind was eagerly looking for a day of fun at the mall.

"I send you inside and you dress up as anybody you want, then I come in dressed as anybody I want. Whoever finds the other person first wins! If you win, I'll buy you a new toy and if I win, you have to clean the house everyday this summer," she explained with joy dancing across her face.

"Deal!" I exclaimed, focusing only on the endless possibilities of toys I could get.

"You have ten minutes before I walk in and find you, so make your disguise count."

I quickly sprinted inside the mall and ran into a bathroom stall, thinking about who I wanted to be.

By the time the ten minute mark was up, I walked out of the stall as a frail old lady. I figured it was the best cover I could pick since was a little kid.

I tried to look around the mall for any person who looked like they could be Mom in disguise.

A bunch of kids, a young boy with brown hair and blue eyes, a fellow old person with a walker, and a group of tall, foreign college kids, who looked like basketball players, all walked around aimlessly around me.

I quickly concluded that we didn't have the walker in the car on the ride over here, so Mom couldn't be the old person.

The college kids were a group, so she couldn't be them, so it had to be the blue-eyed boy!

I began trailing him, subtly keeping my distance. All the while I thought about the toy that would soon be mine!

The boy broke away from the crowd of mall shoppers to go to the bathroom, and I followed, ready to spring in after him, but suddenly I felt my small body begin to float.

When I peered around, to see what was happening, I realized that one of the foreign kids, a 6'10 darker-skinned male, had snatched me off my feet and had started to carry me directly out of the mall!

To this day, I wonder what the other people in that mall thought, seeing that scene play out right in front of them.

Before I could even pray that this was my mom and not some crazy young kid with a geezer fetish, I was plopped down on the pavement in front of our car.

The tall kid smiled as he patted my head and spoke in a deep tone.

"I win."

"M-Mom?!" I stuttered, still shocked by such a difference in appearance.

"Yeah, I saw those jocks walking in and I figured if another tall guy bumps into them and talks about basketball, that he'd blend right in," she explained, her deep voice still throwing me off.

"But...you're so...tall!" I said and my mom scowled down at me.

That's when I knew I messed up.

"And what was I before, Chelsea?!" she asked with anger in her unfamiliar tone.

"Um...average...?"

"Good save, now come on. Let's go home so you can start on your chores!" Mom huffed, taking off her disguise and helping me out of mine.

"Mom... Why did you show me this?" I asked as we packed away all of the stuff back into the chest.

"Because one day when they come, your father's beat-'em-up karate nonsense is going to get him a dart to the face and when that happens, instead of hiding in the woods like an animal, we need to be able to hide in plain sight," she said without emotion.

The thought of Dad fighting strongly against dozens of men before a dart sinks his eyeball, flashed through my mind. It didn't help that my little kid imagination added the image of his body going limp in a pool of his own brains, the shock making me burst into tears.

"It's okay, Chelly, that's why we keep on training, so we we can survive when we need to," Mom said softly, drying my tears.

"So Dad won't die if we train hard and learn quick?" I sniffled.

"I don't know... Maybe..." she shrugged nonchalantly, which only made me sob harder.