For the first 16 years of my married life, I was the only person in my family without a Y chromosome.

I can’t help thinking that the Y chromosome was aptly named. “Why?” is a question I have asked my boys innumerable times since the day they were born.

“Why is there peanut butter in my shoe?”

“Why are there Twizzlers in the hamster cage?”

“Why did you stuff a Lego up your nose?”

Why… why… Y?

As amusing as life was back then, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was the crazy one. It seemed as though I was the only one in my family who thought those things were not normal.

Then, one day, fourteen years ago, another being with an extra X entered my life and I suddenly knew without a doubt that it was the rest of my family who were a bunch of lunatics. My daughter, my extra X, had arrived.

X is for X-quisite, X-ceptional and X-citing! Here, in this tiny scrap of feminine humanity, I would find my sanity.

My little girl grew into a lovely young lady who seems to be wise beyond her years.

I never had to dig a Lego out of her nose. In fact, I never had to dig anything out of her nose.

She likes fruits and vegetables so it’s unlikely that she’d be the one who put peanut butter in my shoes.

The hamster didn’t make it through the Ys’ adolescence, so my daughter put herself in charge of our two cats so they would survive.

However, she, like her mother, has to constantly gird herself against the Y’s in our household who like to mess with her just to see if they can tick her off. It’s as if they can’t stand to see peace and contentment on the face of an X.

To be fair, though, the Y’s are extremely protective of their X. If she ever brings a boyfriend to the house to meet the family, he may not make it out alive.

Not to worry, my 14-year old young lady has said that boys are immature and that based on the Y’s in her family, she may never have a boyfriend.

She X-plored the library last week and brought back the first book in the “Twilight” series. The Y’s went ballistic! You’d have thought she’d brought home a boyfriend!

One of my older Y’s said to me “I can’t believe you are letting her read that stuff! It’s not even believable; the vampires sparkle in the sun! How ridiculous! Everyone knows vampires don’t sparkle!”

This coming from someone who thinks it’s okay for his younger brother to play “realistic” video games where the object is to shoot people and blow up buildings.

My daughter, in order to soothe her Ys’ feelings, has started to cover her reading material with book covers, so that they can’t see what she is reading. X-pansive.

Because my Y’s know that they are not allowed to hurt a girl, they will satisfy their need for conflict by poking my daughter or invading her space. She has decided to take up Combat Hapkido “for X-ercise,” but she X-hibits restraint when demonstrating on her Y’s to save their pride. X-cellent.

This young lady began reading the last of the “Twilight” series yesterday. She suddenly got up, closed the book and announced, “This book is getting weird now. She’s pregnant! How stupid can she be?”

My daughter never picked up the book again. She is… X-traordinary.