David Wilkes
October 21, 2021 11:37 PM
News from the Schoolground. by David Wilkes
Hi Dad! Hi Sage!You guys won't believe what just happened!!! I got asked to the Ball!!!!! Remember my friend Gabriel, you guys met him at the Concert? Yeah, he totally just asked me!!!
"Maybe I shouldn't have sent her to drama camp again over the summer," said David Wilkes, looking over the letter from his daughter. "Maybe I should have hired her an English tutor instead."
"Oh, she's just being a kid," said his wife, taking the letter from him to give it a second reading.
"Which, semi-in context, is what worries me," muttered David.
Sage stopped reading and looked at him over the top of the paper in her hand. "Oh no," she said. "David, you're not going to start doing the whole - overbearing overprotective dad thing, are you?"
David considered the question for a moment. "I have a horrible feeling that that's exactly what I'm starting to do," he said. "To the extent I really do overbearing, anyway. Oh, don't look like that. Morgan can break the rules of punctuation, but I can't at least sort of bend one of the principles of feminism? Seems kinda un-egalitarian to me...."
Sage did not take the bait. "You're doing the thing again," she pointed out.
The thing. The thing was a recurring issue in their marriage. David had no memory of a time in his life when his first reaction to any particular emotion had been anything other than an attempt to deflect it with jokes or sarcasm. He was pretty sure the closest Sage had yet come to leaving him had been during couples' counseling after they'd found out Morgan existed; he'd managed on that day to start doing the thing - specifically, relating the parable of the sad clown who went to the psychiatrist for depression and got told to go watch his own performance to cheer up - while they had been discussing why he should not do the thing. The problem, though, was that what else was he supposed to do? He had expressed genuine, unfiltered negative emotions twice in his life before being dragged into said couples' counseling, and both occasions were events he profoundly regretted.
"I know," he said with a grimace. "Sorry. It's...all right, so it's none of my business what Morgan does as long as it's sane and legal and not in my house." He would draw a hard line there, even if it could be demonstrably proven to him that it was enough of a chauvinistic stereotype to make his family proud of him for essentially the first time ever. He loved his wife and daughter both dearly, and tried to make up for not being very good at saying so by letting them have their own ways in pretty much everything, but surely Sage and Morgan could cope with there being something he just could not get past the ideas he'd been raised on about? That wasn't too much to ask, was it?
"But," he continued, going back to semi-safer ground, "you know as well as I do that that boy ad his parents didn't look like our kind of people. Maybe they're decent enough," he conceded; since he wasn't completely sure if the kid of a Muggleborn and a Muggle would even be considered a half-blood, he supposed it was a mark in the Wilsons' favor that they had just been, well, civil to anyone in his family. "The kid seemed like a nice kid. I liked the parents, as far as that conversation went. But I'm allowed to get worried if Morgan's going to a formal with someone like that. And besides...."
"Besides what?" asked Sage.
David shrugged uncomfortably. "Morgan dating anyone creates a certain...parenting problem, you know? I get the impression it's something everybody would rather not have to deal with with their kids, but under our...particular circumstances...."
"Paren...." Something appeared to click for Sage. "Oh," she said. "That."
"That," David repeated, figuring it was likely that she had drawn the correct conclusion. "I don't know whether your or Amanda or my mother will handle it, just that I'm not getting remotely involved in that conversation, but I'm pretty sure I'll end up worrying that the kid thinks we all wish she didn't exist for a few months anyway."
"Did you ever?"
"Did I ever what?"
Strangely, it was Sage's turn to look like she wished she hadn't said something and could go back to the happy world of denying eighty to ninety percent of her emotions, insecurities, and so forth. Nevertheless, she continued. "Ever wish that Morgan had never been born," she said.
David stared at her. "What the hell kind of question is that?" he asked finally.
"One I've wondered about," Sage admitted. "You were pretty up-front with me about how you never wanted to have kids almost from the beginning."
"That's because it would probably violate the Geneva Conventions to try to inflict being related to me and mine on anybody else on purpose," said David. "I got a fingernail's length away from turning into a complete wreck about three or four different times before you met me, and my family has - I'm not talking about my sisters when I say this, that's another problem, but our family kind of has a history of being bat---- crazy," he explained. "But what was the point with Morgan? Kid was seven before I knew anything about her, and it'd be real hard to claim she wasn't mine."
"David...you do remember what you wrote down instead of Amanda's name in our address book, don't you?"
"Unfortunately," said David. "Though I've been thinking about changing that one," he admitted.
"It really is a rude thing to call someone, the way it is now. And a bit petty."
"I'm not worried about any of that," said David, dismissing the morality of the issue with a hand wave. "Just don't want to have to worry about Morgan seeing it. I'm pretty sure it's still a factual description, but...Amanda is technically her mother. But even if Amanda was also sleeping with a few of my more similar-looking cousins - "
" - which wouldn't be hard to do in that town - " Sage muttered; the degree of interconnectedness in Industry, Kentucky never seemed to completely cease to amaze her.
" - It's still - that might explain the kid being a dead ringer for me, but being a witch on top of that? Nah. Kid was there, kid was mine, wasn't any point in wishing for anything at that point." Sage didn't react; David recognized this as a trap, but his discomfort with domestic tension was such that he couldn't help but walk right into it. "I felt bad for Morgan, of course, having to grow up in Industry, and...yeah, I wasn't happy that going back to Kentucky to prove a point to you about how my family was impossibly ----ed up and we were better off without 'em ended up with me keeping in touch with everybody instead of just going back to pretending the whole town didn't exist, but I don't remember ever just thinking, 'damn, I wish this kid didn't exist', specifically. What would the point of that have been?"
Sage shrugged. "Lots of people blame their kids for their problems," she pointed out. "It doesn't make any sense, but it seems to make them feel better."
"Well, that's stupid of 'em," said David shortly. He'd heard his accent begin to creep out in his previous speech, which it would do under stress. He made a mental note to keep everything else he said as short as possible to minimize the degree to which it was noticeable.
"But understandable."
David had no idea what Sage was getting at, but he thought she was getting at something. He decided, therefore, to use her own Open and Honest Communication thing against her.
"I get the feeling you're saying something I'm not following," he said.
Sage shrugged again. "I always...I guess you worrying about Morgan reminded me of the day we met her," she said. David winced at the memory - well, mostly pseudo-memory; there wasn't a lot of that day he recalled all that clearly - of that event. "You'd known about this kid for twenty minutes, but when she said what she said about how she'd gotten in trouble for crying too much at your sister's funeral....It was just...surprising, how you'd always said you didn't want anything to do with kids but just immediately started...at least trying to be a good dad, anyway, even if the attempt was a little addled at the time."
"Wasn't Morgan's fault," David repeated, ignoring the light censure of his mental state that day and puzzled by this line of conversation. "If I'd stayed in Industry, I don't even reckon it would have been my fault if she'd turned out as much of a screwup as the rest of us. But I got out, so I owed it to the kid to at least give her a chance in life, you know?" Various anxieties objected to the implied certainty that that was a thing he could do, or had ever been able to do. "Or - well, to try to, anyway," he amended. "And now I get to worry about how the kid can get the message to not have kids in irregular circumstances without hurting her feelings, and about how she might be setting herself up for trouble, and...whatever else I can come up with, there's always a few more," he concluded with a sigh. "But ah well - it could be worse."
"It can always be worse," Sage pointed out.
"But it isn't. Not today. It's all pretty good right now, outside my head anyway. Guess that's all I can ask for, yeah?"
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David Wilkes
News from the Schoolground.
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