Gabrielle Ho­sein

You may be sur­prised to know that the most ver­bal­ly abu­sive per­son in my life is my three-year-old. Or, per­haps, if you are a par­ent, you are not sur­prised.

Aside from dis­claim­ing me as her friend when­ev­er she's re­sent­ful of my au­thor­i­ty, Ziya al­so has sud­den­ly be­gun to ar­tic­u­late, with Amer­i­can Psy­cho meets Volde­mort dark­ness, all the ways she can think of maim­ing me.

'I will hit you on your head with a tree', she threat­ens. 'I will push you and make you fall down and get hurt', she promis­es. 'I will mash up your face', she swears, chan­nel­ing The God­fa­ther. At this point, I be­gan to get con­cerned.

She was al­ways phys­i­cal­ly as­sertive, wrestling me in the nights when she want­ed to fall asleep breast­feed­ing and I was push­ing her off, fling­ing both legs and arms like a Tas­man­ian Dev­il in in­fre­quent though full-scale two-year-old tantrums, lash­ing out when she was vex at her dad or me and then hav­ing to apol­o­gise for hit­ting.

That's av­er­age, if an­noy­ing. What's ter­ri­fy­ing is when her lit­tle brain starts to use her ex­pand­ing vo­cab­u­lary to imag­ine and de­tail in­flic­tion of harm and pain to as­sert dom­i­nance, ex­act re­venge or reg­is­ter re­sis­tance.

Stone and I nev­er throw words at each oth­er. In 14 years, he's nev­er in­sult­ed or be­come an­gry enough to say mean things to me, and vice ver­sa. We don't put each oth­er down and we don't put Ziya down.

?