When my 5-year-old picks a fight, she doesn't pull any punches.

Lately, she's been pummeling me with attacks on my character.

"You're not being like a mom," she has told me several times over the past few weeks.

While I could come up with an extensive list to rebut her accusation, it never seems worth the trouble when we're locking horns.

Why bother? Her criticism always seems to come precisely because I am acting in my official mom capacity.

What she's really trying to express is that she doesn't like the boundaries I've set, the rules I've established or the routine I desperately try (and regularly fail) to stick to.

She doesn't have the vocabulary or the savvy to express what she really wants to say and ends up retreating to her fallback position: "Moms are supposed to make their children happy."

I agree. With caveats. Sure, I want for my children every sort of happiness a child deserves. The difference is that my daughter lives entirely in the now. She wants immediate gratification and has no interest in considering the consequences.

Me? I'm in it for the long haul, which means looking at the big picture, taking the hard line when necessary, and helping my children realize that instant gratification is nice, but long-term satisfaction is better.

Sometimes the battle is over homework. If she doesn't want to do it at the designated time, she's not going to look back and remember what's happened in similar situations. She can't anticipate the pride in completing a task any more than she can recall how awful she feels when she turns up at school with unfinished work.

Instead she's going to resist. She'll give up before even looking at what she needs to do and inevitably, getting her to start takes more time than the actual assignment and sucks up whatever time she might have used for whatever it was she wanted to do in the first place.

Until it's done, I am the un-mom and she — pulling out all the theatrics — behaves like a petulant orphan waiting for a fairy godmother to wave a magic wand and turn her blank paper into a masterpiece or for a prince to come and take her away from mundane tasks like learning reading, writing and arithmetic.

When there's something else she'd rather do, any interruptions like bedtime, bathtime, dinnertime or the always ill-received "dinner is over" time strike her as appallingly unmaternal structures I've put in place to suck the joy from her life.

But that's part of what makes me her mom. I've learned that instant gratification can mean momentary happiness for a child and a bit of peace for a parent, but in the long run, everything left undone leads to an even more complicated undoing of the damage caused by letting things go in the first place.

As long as I continue to push and pull her along, she'll eventually learn some adjectives and will be able to tell me exactly what kind of mom she thinks I am.

I'm pretty sure she'll come up with some zingers, just as she'll eventually realize that no matter what her complaints might be, they come as a direct result of my being her mom, not because I've abandoned the post.