What is perhaps the most surprising part of Alexis Stewart's childhood memories is that her mom Martha was terrible at creating fun and memorable holidays. "Halloween was also a grim affair: There were no costumes," she writes. "There was no anything. We turned off all the lights and pretended we weren't home."
Sadly, the painful holiday memories also didn't stop at just Halloween. "Martha was not interested in being kid-friendly," writes Alexis. "She would hand me things right before Christmas and say, 'Now wrap these but don't look inside."
Alexis says that she felt that her mother expected her to be perfect. "If I didn't do something perfectly, I had to do it again," she writes. "I grew up with a glue gun pointed at my head." Yet oddly enough. Martha managed to act very imperfectly when Alexis' friends were over. Alexis writes that her mom would use the bathroom with the door left ajar and didn't bother to close it when she had her friends over, something that mortified her as a girl.
