Nazi Papa

Kiddos' dad and I generally do a reasonable job of our legally-enshrined 50% co-parenting- the kiddos' fineness being the evidence. The arrangement, functioning well for 8 years, is a swap-around of kiddos' homebase every 2-3 days.

But the Nazi Papa is again exceeding his authority and re-kindling his issues.

Wee wan should've started High School today, but the strike by public service school janitors (hooray!) meant her commencement is delayed till tomorrow. I'd assumed that wee wan would spend the day at my house 'home alone' (it being my parental shift) until I arrived home from work at 5.30 pm. But there was no wee wan here, and no message on my answerphone or mobile reassuring me that she was in safe hands. So tonight I phone the dad to ask where the 12 yr old kiddo might be?

She's with him, thankfully. It turns out Nazi Papa has decided unilaterally, retrospectively, without communicating his decisions and without regard to law that a 12 yr old wee wan, with more common sense in her little finger than most 40 yr olds, would be neglected and endangered if 'home alone' in the daytime. That she's been home alone for 2 hours after school for a year, and several 8 hour stints over these summer holidays, seems immaterial.

Then Nazi Papa laid down his other New Regime for the Big Wan. It was the first day of his 5th Year, but I'd granted permission for him to go to tea at one of his Fraggle Rock friendies' houses tonight, so long as he was back by 9 pm.

Nazi Papa and I have murmured agreement that Big Wan should be encouraged to do the best he can academically this year. However, I was neither consulted nor informed of Nazi Papa's new self-declared dictat (unilateral, retrospective, uncirculated and enacted without negotiation) that Big Wan is grounded on weekdays for the next 10 months, till his Higher exams are finished. Without telling me, Nazi Papa ruled in my absence that tonight the Big Wan had a curfew to be home with me by 8 pm and not 9 pm.

Nazi Papa labours under the impression that Big Wan's Standard exam results of 7 'credit' grades (1s and 2s) and 1 'foundation' (5) grade were shit. Anything less that 8 '1' grades were pure failure by Big Wan, and now require a lock-down curfew until Big Wan's Higher exams next June.

I remember being 16 (not pleasantly) and a lock down then for 10 months would quite likely have elicited a (defensible) response of 'fuck you', an abandonment of education and family, an application for a council flat in Wester Hailes and a new career as a dolie on green medicine.

I feel a Family Mediation coming on. In Nazi Papa's and my 5th year I can recall no academic study outside school by either of us, but an enthusiastic and time-consuming extra-curricular interest in shagging each other senseless. Despite this, we both got to Uni, graduated, one of us got a PhD and one of us a well-paying management job permitting a good standard of living, selective amnesia and implicit authority.