“Sent her to her room. Then cried about it.”
“No kidding. I probably would have too.”
Rowan shook his head. “You probably wouldn’t have ended up in this situation to begin with. She loves you and you know what she likes.”
“She likes,” Jordy said slowly, “raspberry fruit juice. The one she threw on the floor? It’s her favorite. Trust me, that wasn’t about the juice.”
“Okay, maybe not, but everything else.”
“Rowan, it was a bad day. They happen to kids too. Only when you’re six, your emotions are bigger than your body, and your brain can’t regulate them. Sometimes when a kid wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, they stay that way, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” He shrugged. True, today sounded especially bad—Jordy hadn’t seen one like it in a while—but given all the changes in Kaira’s life recently, one day of regression wasn’t too surprising.
“Okay, fine, so she was grumpy, but you could’ve done something. You did do something.”
“Sure, but if I’d been here all day, I wouldn’t have been much of a magical cure. Or maybe we would have sat and cuddled all day. Who knows? But the fact that she wanted her dad doesn’t change the fact that she was being an irrational six-year-old who was also kind of a dick all day.”
Rowan barked a surprised laugh. “Can you call her that?”
Jordy shrugged. “Who’s gonna tell me I can’t, her dad?”
That got another short laugh, and Rowan dry-washed his face. “Okay, I concede that maybe I didn’t completely fail at looking after her today. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t a terrible idea. I fell apart in the face of rage-filled child.”
Forcing himself to approach this logically, Jordy considered what he knew of the day so far. “Did you yell at her?”
“What?”
“When she threw juice all over the floor and you sent her to her room. Did you yell at her? Strike her?”
“No!” Rowan looked horrified. “Of course not. I’m not a monster. I just told her to go and then had aquietmeltdown.”
“So my child was a total hellion today, and you were patient enough to make her two breakfastsandlunches, you kept trying to play with her despite her constant criticism, and you didn’t take the easy road and turn on the TV because you wanted to respect the boundaries I’ve established.” Though honestly, after today, Jordy wouldn’t have been upset about it if Rowan had put the TV on. Sometimes you did what you had to. But Kaira probably would’ve thought Bluey was too blue today anyway. “You kept your cool. You didn’t yell or scare her.” Jordy cocked his head and said gently, “I’m not sure anyone could have handled it better. From where I’m sitting, it looks like you managed remarkably well for someone who’s never lived with a six-year-old before.”
“Not yelling at a kid is not a medal-worthy achievement,” Rowan protested.
Jordy hooted. He didn’t want to be mean, but—“Says the guy who’s never lived with a two-year-old. Or a four-year-old. Did you know that stage is called the Fucking Fours?”
Rowan laughed too—another point for Jordy. “No. Seriously?”
“Oh yeah. It’s like the Terrible Twos but with more vocabulary and sass. I’ve never felt more judged in my life, and my job involves regular performance reviews from journalists and all of Twitter.”
“Wow.” Rowan wiped his face again and sighed. “Okay, so maybe a day spent with an unhappy kid made me atadmelodramatic.”
“Hmm.”
“Oh shut up. She threw her juice on the floor.”
“Yeah, I’ll give you that one as being especially bad.” Jordy winced again, then figured he might as well throw himself under the bus for Rowan’s sake. “I should have seen today coming, honestly. Not exactly this, but I should have realized things were going too smoothly and braced us for some bad days or some regression. It’s pretty common for kids to react to changes by acting younger or wanting to do ‘babyish’ things. So being a brat and demanding her dad even though she knows he can’t come home? Not exactly out of left field.”
Rowan slumped. “So what you’re saying is that there will be more days like this.”
“Not necessarily. This might be it. Or she might spend a day asking to cuddle or be carried. Last year, after my season ended and I was home more, she carried her armadillo around everywhere for a week and sucked her thumb.”
“That just sounds fucking adorable. I’ll take that next time.”
“If only we got to choose. Chaos and unpredictability are the only constants of parenthood.”
“So, get used to it?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to say it quite like that….”
