That was the problem with being a parent: Things kept getting all serious on you. It was hard to be inadvisably levitous when clear child abuse was on the table. “Okay, yes. It was wrong. We all agree it was wrong.”Funny as hell, though. “But I’m sure Jaz knows it was wrong too.”
“She might. Or she might think that kind of behaviour is acceptable if somebody is”—I could spot Oliver’susing my words against metells a mile away—“enough of a piece of shit. If she knows it was wrong, our job is to help her to act on that knowledge. If she doesn’t, it’s our job to teach her. Either way, she needs to understand that we won’t turn a blind eye to her acting out.”
“And you think grounding her, taking her phone away, and making her write an apology letter, all at the same time, will help with that?” I really hoped I was keeping the what-are-you-on tone out of my voice, but hope isn’t the same as expectation.
“You’d rather we spent the rest of our lives living next door to people who harboured a deep resentment against us?”
Honestly, I thought that ship might have already sailed. “You realise Next Door’s Kid’s Mum—”
“Jacqueline,” Oliver reminded me.
“You realise she called Jaz a ‘chavvy termagant’?”
In Oliver’s eyes, I could see the war between his desire to have a positive relationship with the Next Door’s Kid’s Family and his needto call out classist language. “That was wrong of her, but I suspect she was very angry.”
“What evenisa termagant?” I asked.
“A harsh-tempered or overbearing woman.”
I tried not to think in terms of points, or to see our family and next door as competing teams. But I gave points to our team. “So she was being sexist as well.”
“Using gendered terminology, certainly. But as I say, she was probably angry. Her sonhadjust been thrown in a wheelie bin.”
Screw it. I was done being dispassionate. I was all in on Team O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson. “Says her,” I rebutted, super eloquently. “You never even got Jaz to tell us her version.”
“She didn’t deny it.”
I leaned back on the kitchen chair. “Oh, great lawyering. Is that what you say in court? ‘My client didn’t deny it the one time they got asked, so you should lock them up, Your Honour.’”
With, honestly, more calm than I might have deserved in that exact moment, Oliver raised an eyebrow. “I think I’d make a slightly better case than that. But in general, if one of my clients answered any question I can easily think of with the words ‘He had it coming,’ I would revise my expectation of winning that case downwards. Precipitously.”
“Okay but, like, you know you got really intense in there, don’t you?”
From the way Oliver looked at me, he did not, in fact, know he had got really intense in there. “It was a difficult situation that I dealt with as best I was able.”
And that finally got us to the heart of the problem. “Right,” I tried, wanting to be decisive for once, rather than nervouslyokay-buttingmy way through the whole conversation. “Only the thing is, was this really ayouthing? Like, shouldn’t it have been more of anusthing?”
Oliver nodded, but I didn’t think it was a good kind of nod. “It should, but you apparently didn’t want to back me up.”
Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. That really wasn’t where I’d been going with this. “How could I back you up when I had no idea what you were planning to do?”
From the way he was looking at me, Oliver literally could not comprehend what my problem was. “It should have been obvious. Jasmine had done something wrong, so we needed to—”
“I swear if you say ‘Set boundaries,’ I’m going to throw a banana at you.”
Oliver’s lips tightened just fractionally. “We needed to discipline her. We needed to do it in a compassionate way, which we did—”
“Did we?”
“Yes.”
I put my head in my hands. I really didn’t like getting into putting-my-head-in-my-hands-level arguments. Especially not with my actual life partner. “Oliver,” I pleaded, “can you just sort of…can you listen to yourself here, because you’re sounding a bit…” I wasthis closeto sayingLike your dad, but we were in too small a space for me to be throwing grenades. So I said, “Fifties patriarch.”
“Ah yes.” Oliver’s fine line in weaponised sarcasm zinged into the room. “Because fifties patriarchs were renowned for their hands-on, child-centric approach to parenting.”
“Is making a kid write a longhand apology letter and then confiscating their phone when they don’t like the idea really a ‘hands-on, child-centric approach’?”
“Ye—”
