“” – Laura Bailey
It turns out you can cancel a child’s nursery place the same way you ghost a Tinder date: quietly, behind someone’s back, and on a day you know they’re feeling hopeful enough to pay for the whole thing.
I emailed the nursery for an updated invoice, since we’d adjusted our daughter’s start date. One predictable task in a season where everything else was on fire. The response came quickly: Laura had cancelled the slot and asked them to reassign it to the next child in line.
That was how I found out. Not with a conversation. Not even with a text. Just a gentle administrative beheading.
When I asked Laura about it, she pantomimed confusion like it was her first language. No idea what I was talking about. Must be a mistake. We both know that tone—the one reserved for telling a child the ice cream shop is “closed today” while you’re standing in front of it.
I checked again with the nursery. Not a mistake. The emails told the story: I’d been removed from communications; our daughter’s place had been offered to another family. When I confronted her a second time, the truth shifted again. We had “both agreed” to cancel the slot, apparently. We hadn’t.
So I pressed once more, and the truth shifted a third time. “Well, I changed my mind, so I cancelled it.” As if parenting were a newsletter you could unsubscribe from between prosecco refills.
Then came the final move: moral high ground by way of a legal shrug. She’d “sought legal advice,” she said. She was “allowed” to do it and didn’t need to inform me. Box checked. Ethics outsourced. Conversation over.
This has been the pattern since 2023. The same excuse justified her attempts to push out our assistant and our nanny. There couldn’t be anyone in the house who might witness the ordinary, unglamorous reality and contradict the escalating series of allegations about me. Witnesses complicate stories. It’s easier to turn the home into a sealed room.
From the outside, it probably looked like a difference of opinion about childcare. On the inside, it felt like a campaign to erase context. Fire the people who see. Cancel the place that gives our daughter structure and other adults in the loop. Strip away the third parties until it’s just two versions of the story, and then ask the world which one sounds more reasonable.
The choreography was always the same:
- Do the thing.
- Deny the thing.
- Rewrite the past (“we both agreed”).
- Finish with a condescending lecture about rights and procedures.
It’s a tidy little algorithm. It takes more energy to untangle than to execute. You spend your days assembling proof that a door you watched close actually closed, and your nights wondering how many more doors are being quietly locked while you sleep.
There’s a special kind of absurdity in co-parenting with someone who insists the sky is green and then emails the sun to say you agree. You can point at the sky. You can show the email. But the point isn’t the color. The point is to keep you disproving the last lie just long enough for the next manufactured crisis to begin.
I wish this ended with a neat resolution. It doesn’t. It’s just one more page in two years of tactical erasures. One more example of how “allowed” can be used as a synonym for “right,” and how denial can be deployed as a weapon until you’re too exhausted to argue.
Do something quietly. Deny it loudly. Claim the high ground smugly. That was the method. And without witnesses, it works. It works so well you start to doubt you were ever in the room.