death of the author

15 May, 2026

CN: repeated relational trauma

On Mother’s Day morning, bright and early, I’d started telling my friend about the Bravo reality TV show The Valley, “which I watch just so I can continue being friends with my friends,” I joked. She was skeptical.

Well, it’s pretty AuDHD in there, I continued, defending my friend group’s hobbies. I reasoned aloud to her: If fantasy football is a hobby where men passionately calculate and budget the ‘true cost’ of each member of their team, reality television is a study of dark interpersonal patterns—and the effects of editing—all in an effort to root out the ‘true story’. Fantasy football and reality TV are two different edges of the same animal: the collective and individual costs of backing the wrong horse.

The Valley is a logical follow-up to the original show, Vanderpump Rules, in which Lisa Vanderpump, like a vain but ultimately caring mother, hands down her heteronormative wisdom to a rotating stable of ambitious, attractive, horny 20something-year-old employees. How’s that working out for them? The Valley follows her employees off to the ‘burbs, checking in on how marriage and parenthood are playing out.

After finally watching the first episode of the new season, I’d approached my girl group apologetically. I didn’t want them to kill me, but “I’ve come around on Janet,” I admitted to them. Janet had been getting the villain edit, not just from her castmates, but from the network itself. I laid out the facts. “This concludes my book report,” I’d messaged them.

To understand Janet’s villain edit, you have to know about the loveliest couple on the show, Nia and Danny. Danny is a former child actor who now picks up regular voice work; Nia is an ultra-Christian pageant winner, a former Miss USA. She is beauty, she is grace—a literal Disney princess—and Danny is her literal short king.

But at the very top of the show, in season 1, Nia is unhappy about being moved out of the city and into the ‘burbs. She feels deep shame and remorse at struggling with depression and anxiety. Her husband, cooing and compassionate, is also uncompromising and unyielding: he’s already making every decision. He has faith she’ll get over her postpartum depression. He, of course, continues to go into the city for work, while his wife sits at home in isolation, tending to their children.

He also has, maybe not a drinking problem, in that he rarely drinks—but when he does drink, he gropes their friends, swats their asses while asking them to grab him another beer, that kind of thing. The friend group affectionately refers to this alter ego as “Darkside Danny,” all of them laughing it off, accepting that, when he’s blacked out, this doting family man treats women like trash.

Janet loses it, refusing to drop the topic of Danny’s drinking behavior. She alienates everyone—especially the woman who was most recently a target of drunken groping, since that woman’s experience, her story, is not Janet’s to tell, and so the already-tertiary friend feels increasingly disempowered and left-out the more Janet talks—and Janet especially alienates Danny’s wife Nia, who fiercely goes to bat for him, loyal, shielding him.

“And anyone can see what’s happening if they just take a moment,” I explained to my friend now. Janet is absolutely correct about the dark pattern she sees. I see it clearly: Nia is stranded in the suburbs, with the reality show itself her only tie to her own life and friendships, while Danny happily builds his new little kingdom in Santa Clarita. And she makes him look good! And she’s a wonderful mother to their children! And as season three opens she is now toting a fourth child, an infant, and Danny is telling their social circle he has no intention at stopping at five, six, seven.

“It’s a trap!” my best friend said in surprise.

“It is a trap,” I said, nodding. “But it’s a trap Nia chose, and don’t some people want that life?” With all its trappings.

There would be ways to compromise, to divide labor, to have a beautiful life with everyone’s clearly-articulated needs being matched and met, but that would entail a good-faith two-way collab. Why collaborate at all? Collaboration isn’t very interesting when one person is reaping all the benefits and the other is reaping none whatsoever. (It’s easy enough, from Nia’s perspective, to reason “if he’s happy, I’m happy,” but this has no legs, no longevity, because this is a resources issue, not an emotional one: an unsustainable burn rate.) No matter what Nia tries, she is unable to renegotiate the terms of their agreement. Danny, that happy, fulfilled king, will never acknowledge the reality that his wife is being depleted, clearcut, drained of life; his only job is to keep her busy, distracted from her own grief. He’s using a pile of babies—workload—to distract Nia from her own crippling depression, since she obviously just needs more to do.

In this dysfunctional system, Nia will eventually become ill, burned-out, a ghost of herself, and her husband will tell her it’s her own fault, that her own happiness is her own responsibility, that she’s an unfit parent, that she should’ve been able to extract more joy, more satisfaction, from her own day-to-day drudgery, just as he does from his own work. If she continues declaring her unhappiness out loud to any who will listen, hoping someone with more sway—someone he actually respects!—can talk some sense into him, he will accuse her of a sort of treason, the ultimate crime. She will gasp and protest and plead with him.

After she’s given all, will she have won Danny’s devotion? No, she’ll be unceremoniously dispatched and replaced with, not even necessarily a younger woman or a ‘newer model’, but anyone who reminds Danny of “how my wife used to be.” Because that’s his real soulmate—his wife, as she once was, a wife who betrayed him by deteriorating—and anyone who is endlessly giving and conciliatory and accommodating, any A.I. girlfriend, will of course fit the bill next time. Close enough.

And there’s really no point in villainizing Danny for any of this, because this is exactly what men are told that they want or need, their birthright, what they were born to do. This is the dark pattern that parents pass down to their children, where every relationship is a transaction and your only job is to haggle, to negotiate for yourself, the best possible deal. If Danny tells Nia he’s a good, normal husband, he’d… probably be right!

Now Danny has yet another useful distraction—a readymade villain—in Janet. Meanwhile, Kristen—a career shit-stirrer, who was previously herself given the villain edit but who lately has been enjoying a ‘right all along’ redemption arc—is helpfully contributing to this villain narrative, calling Janet a “shit-stirrer” who “wants relevance.” This is a projection, obviously. More horrifying, though, she calls Janet the worst thing you can possibly call someone: “a fan.” A ladder-climber; a starfucker. Kristen is claiming that Janet was always a longtime fan of the show, that she wormed her way onto Bravo, cozying her way in.

So Kristen is characterizing Janet as an outsider, an interloper. “And Kristen knows better,” I explained now, a little angrily. “Even so, interlopers can have the clearest sight,” I sighed—interlopers have, potentially, an objective view of the proceedings, a clear vantage of events unfolding—“so when someone’s screaming ‘don’t listen to this one’, it should make you think, ah, what is it that you aren’t wanting me to hear.”

There’s truth to the “relevance” thing, though; Janet is a fixer. By the start of season three, Janet has finally put herself in therapy, wanting to get to the bottom of the mystery of why she is so obsessed with trying to make others see what she sees, why this all reminds her of junior high, why she can’t drop a subject.

“She’s probably very justice-oriented,” my best friend sniffed.

I smiled crookedly. “She is married to a lawyer,” I said, nodding.

“Ah!” my best friend said.

And it seems like a perfectly nice marriage, this thing with Janet and her lawyer husband Jason, although Kristen is now attempting to poke holes in it, questioning Jason’s loyalty to his spouse, spreading little rumors, little seeds of sabotage. Janet is Nancy Drew; Jason is some sort of attorney in workers’ comp. Janet lives in service of the truth, while he probably knows more about finessing a narrative, laying out the facts compellingly, than she does. (Here’s a wrinkle I maybe did not expect: Jason works on the side of corporations, and does not fight on behalf of the ‘little guy’.)

“I don’t see a way out for Nia,” my best friend said glumly.

I nodded. For most people it starts at rock bottom, and that’s the truth. “She has to get it first,” I said. “It has to be her own realization. It might take 10, 15 years. But what if she can do it in five? That is my hope. At any rate, now she has to keep doing the show, for her own freedom. Hopefully they can split their earnings when they do part ways.” In an ideal world, she’d hoard her portion and then make a run for it, shocking her spouse, filing from another planet. But that isn’t how this will play out. Each time she notices she is getting the short end of the shit stick, she’ll just announce it to Danny, operating under the misunderstanding, the delusion, that he’ll care.

I looked worried. I don’t even know these people! I’m trying to knock this bullshit off.

“But Janet does have to drop it,” I said, “because she’s very likely driving Nia further and further from discovering the truth herself.” It’s not anyone’s job to interfere. Trying to do so inadvertently plays right into Danny’s Machiavellian little hands—and into the hands of the editors.

“None of this is real,” my best friend finally said. “It’s called ‘reality’ television, but it’s all faked.”

I grinned. “Oh, is it?” I said. “I think what actually happens is, a producer goes, ‘I notice you’re having conflict with so-and-so. We’d like to bring our cameras in for a scene.’” And the subject agrees, of course, because they’re being promised airtime: loved or hated, they’ll certainly receive attention, a witnessing. “So the producers are architecting chaos and drama,” I said. “Isn’t that exactly like real life? Don’t we all know a producer?

“It’s why I don’t like or trust Andy Cohen,” I continued. “People think he’s just an interviewer or talking head, not realizing he’s the head architect of Bravo. Some people really love messy women—want them to stay messy, will do anything to keep them messy. Some people will set the stage for conflict and cast the roles themselves, a real-life ‘villain edit’ for their own profit or their own enjoyment. They’re the producer and the audience.” I sighed.

Danny is ultimately a producer: the caring, devoted husband, the good father, lovingly suffering a depressed wife, the wife he is sabotaging.

Now the two of us, my friend and I, were in the car.

I apologized for being such a chatterbox all morning—a nuisance.

“You really are,” she laughed, relieved that I am fully sentient, cognizant of the effect I’m having on others. “No one can get a word in edgewise!”

There was a reason for that. The night before, I’d stayed up with the houseguest. I’d Sherlock Holmesed just enough info about her by examining her—had made a nigh-psychic observation about the course of her life—that had startled her. So! She’d wanted to explain. (I could tell that she loved going out dancing, going two-stepping at the honky-tonk, loving people, loving life. The good guess was this: I’m so glad you married a Going-Out Mack, not a Stay-at-Home Greg. The names were wrong, but my cold reading was correct.)

As a result, she’d told me a tale of two men, a story of long tails and arcing aftereffects, for three hours, not allowing me to ever interrupt, not even when I had an insight or interesting parallel. I’d nodded and sat still. I tried my best. I remember thinking I wonder how many people have interrupted her all her life: had tried to wrench a story away from her, ‘seizing a narrative’; had tried to finish all her sandwiches before she could get to them.

I’d interrupted just once; I’d doubled-down and insisted. “No now wait,” I’d said to her, putting both my hands up. She’d relaxed and looked at me. “Here is the pattern,” I’d said to her. “Isolate. Strand. Gratitude. ‘You’d better be grateful.’” Weaponized gratitude. “And work. Now we’re putting you to work, so you can pay off your debt to us. You’ll never pay off your debt to us.” She’d nodded solemnly, giving my observation its due, before continuing her story.

Because I’d had to sit still and shut up for so long—an antsy kid squirming in her seat—the next morning had found me like a child who’d just gotten home from school, tearing through the house, nattering and prattling and wanting snacks. The houseguest, meanwhile, was exhausted, and she may’ve even believed I was the reason she was exhausted, while the act of passive witnessing had left me with a bizarre, unwanted surplus of energy.

“It’s probably why most people only share a little about themselves at a time,” I said, snorting. Yeah, of course it’s exhausting! I made a mental note to pace myself in the future.

The worst part of it, though, was the way I was left knowing that I’m just like the houseguest—“like looking in a mirror,” I joked to my best friend—but she didn’t know this, because she still didn’t know anything about me. It was a sort of information asymmetry that had resulted in a palpable de-sync, where I kept accidentally interrupting her as if we were on a video call and the stream was lagging, an information packets problem. One of us was overattuned and wired, the other, underattuned and sleepy.

Having explained this—that my surplus of energy was just from sitting still—I felt the excess suddenly burn off.

“Ah, there it goes. I’m done,” I said, exhaling. “Phew. All better now.”

I breathed a little bit.

A thought had occurred to me, and I was wanting to share it now. By having difficulty remaining masked in various environments, this wiggle-worm energy extended itself externally, universally, turning into a sort of philosophical Commitment to the Truth: to uncovering it, articulating it, stating plainly what things are, naming them, observing out loud what is really going on, always intending my little observations as perfectly neutral. To be required to do otherwise—to watch wide-eyed without a mouth—is to get all charged up and unable to discharge, and then going on the fritz.

In turn, when someone doesn’t believe they have a true ‘real’ self at their core, or that the ‘real’ self is broken and unlovable—and therefore all their own resources are being siphoned into the black hole of maintaining the artifice of their own mask, their False Self, their facade—what if, externally, this plays out like a Commitment to Falsehood? Which would look like caping for toxic structures, hierarchies, or institutions, finessing a narrative: a constant, deliberate obfuscation of the truth, all alibis and cover-ups and flying into rages when someone fucks up by accidentally telling the truth, accidentally poking holes in someone’s script or cover story.

What if the commitment to masking results in an overarching, general commitment to concealment? Maybe the Nias find themselves with King Dannys where, every time a Nia nearly uncovers the truth, there’s a certain, almost elegant homeostasis, where a sweet-talking Danny is there to conceal it again, always following her with a broom, sweeping away her little trail of breadcrumbs.

Most people don’t seem to live all the way at one extreme pole or the other, of course. For my own part, I’m working hard at masking better, at not saying everything: at being thoughtful, doing a careful read, before ultimately settling on a tidy, potentially Sphinxy, very guarded reply. I’m trying to learn from Janet’s mistakes, and from my own mistakes that I’ve made interpersonally, most often in the workplace.

“I constantly think about all the times I’ve been framed as the ‘other woman’,” I was saying to my friend now. “Of how many girlfriends and wives¹ have come at me yelling for me to stay away. And I have stayed away,” I said sadly. If nothing else, this unhappy pattern had forced me to forge more female and lgbtqia+ friendships, to find other weirdos with smothering moms and relational trauma, which is great.

“It’s weird,” my friend said. The pattern of being told to scat, she meant.

“Maybe,” I said. “I mean, obviously my presence never posed any real threat to anyone.” I rolled my eyes. “Until I beefed it²,” I muttered.

“I was recently in the bathtub,” I continued, “when I came to the most horrible realization: I am a homewrecker.”

My friend was aghast. “You’re not a homewr—”

“And that’s why [every dysfunctional environment has] hated me so much,” I said sadly. “Because my very presence is going to wreck the home, if that home is a house of cards.”

“Ohhhhhhhhhhh,” my friend said.

“And honestly, they’re right!” I continued, thinking of the Janet problem. “If everyone is screaming ‘we were so happy before you came along, this thing is working for us,’ well, who am I to disagree! If everyone chose this, there’s nothing to fix! Y’all are right. Nothing to see here.” I stay in every environment way too long as if I’m the one whose life depends on it. That leaves me with just one job to do, and it’s to fuck off.

Jesus is the one who said that, by the way. “If your presence is not welcomed, fuck right off.” He said it, not me! Bye, guys!

Stephen Karpman, he of the Karpman Drama/Conflict Triangle, noted that a triangle can be the strongest structure. So if you add a third person, the original pair can be strengthened: the introduction of a third energy does not necessarily result in a destabilization of the original structure. This realization—that destabilization is not a given—makes way for Dr. Emerald’s Empowerment Triangle, the solutions-oriented version of the Karpman Triangle.

At our destination I’d made a joke about how the only meaningful difference between the houseguest’s childhood best friend and my own childhood best friend was, the houseguest’s best friend apparently knows all her deepest, darkest secrets. Mine does not, I quipped.

“Don’t tell me!” my childhood best friend shrieked, shielding her eyes with one hand, as if I were planning to rectify this imbalance right there in the hospital. I laughed. Sure, I would continue to obfuscate the truth, to shield her from the sheer horror of me, no problem.

“I know… I can be… judgmental,” my best friend continued, pacing herself, extracting the truth from herself in pained, measured little bursts. I smiled at her adoringly.

We were leaving the ICU now, and I turned and explained a little bit about what she considered my checkered past—smoking, drinking, bad dates—this legacy of poor decision-making.

“In fiction class,” I explained, “I was the only person who was writing nonfiction. I was writing Me: the Remix.” I sighed. I’d suffered a lot of shame over this. I was a decent enough writer when it came to the medium itself—descriptive literary prose, snappy dialogue—but I didn’t know how to map a good plot. I just… had writer’s block.

“And I got in trouble for writer’s block,” I admitted.

“The professor thought you were blowing off assignments,” she said, guessing correctly, even though we’d never discussed it. I nodded. Yep, my novella’s font size had been getting bigger and bigger, my margins wider, my double-spacing tripled, to the point of hilariousness. My professor had been irate. It looked like half-assery, like I just did not care.

“They say to write what you know. Well, what the hell did I know? I was like 20,” I said. I sighed heavily. “And so in my personal life I eventually developed this problem where I had to see how the night ended. I always had to stay to witness how everything panned out.” So, I explained, I’d stay exactly where I was well past the points of wisdom, good sense, or my own health and well-being, because the conclusion was still obscured from view, and the only way to solve a mystery was by staying to watch it unfold.

“And it was only recently, when I realized I understood how certain things could have gone, or maybe even should have gone”—counting my blessings—“that, no, I don’t need to stay and watch how things end after all. I can just leave, because I can guess. I am capable of guessing.

“And then I realized, ah! Aha! That’s how you write fiction.”

“AUUUUUUGHGHGGHH!!!!” my best friend shouted in frustration, taking both hands off the wheel and gripping the air like she was trying to shake me by the lapels, genuinely infuriated by my shaggy dog of a life.

“You said it,” I mumbled, shaking my head in defeat.

The morning after Mother’s Day, a friend asked to FaceTime. She’d been sobbing. We got onto video. She began to explain. She was a couple sentences in, and I was already smiling.

I wasn’t surprised by the turn things had taken, but maybe I was startled by how quickly it’d occurred. Of course I’d recognized a while ago that something was brewing—I’d have to be blind or in denial, a genuinely bad friend, to not notice it—but the fact was, she was in the process of writing her own best life, and she wasn’t even aware of it. If I were to point out any of her own behaviors or odd statements, I’d in fact be interfering, so I was committed to keeping my mouth shut.

“It’s a real blessing to witness,” I’d previously told someone about something else, “but it’s a real curse to not be able to say anything.”

Now my friend was observing my caginess, my suppressed smile, and she pinned me down verbally: “You know what’s going to happen! You can see the future!” she exclaimed. (Every future but my own, I eventually admitted sadly, and we smiled at each other.)

I said to my friend—of the person who’d abruptly disconnected from her in order to focus on learning to love others without toxicity—“Wow, he really loves you. He’s great!” Then: “Don’t worry, I can have faith in him for you.” I’d heard everything I needed already.

Then I told her about my fresh commitment to not homewrecking—to avoiding whistleblowing as best as I could—to letting interpersonal things shake out organically, all the way, all on their ownsome, no finishing others’ sentences for them. I told her about the bathtub grief, where I’d finally, sadly realized other people recognize me for exactly what I am—clear eyes, big mouth³—pressured into leaving every dysfunctional environment in a hurry, which is awful, because those are the environments where you typically endure and receive paychecks for it.

“Because you won’t play along!” she exclaimed, delighted.

“That’s just it! I try to play along,” I said. “I try so hard. I cannot play along. If I hadn’t left that cult I was momentarily in, I would’ve been thrown out.” Then I told her about the cult⁴ in greater detail than before.

Other people have to go through their own process and, if we meaningfully interrupt it, if we disrupt it in any way, we are obstructing them from their true path. Or, worse, they’ll have to go right back and try the scariest thing all over again. Immediately prior to my latest in-person visit with her, I’d finally had what would look to any impartial observer—one lacking full, horrifying context—like a true menty b. It was a four-day defrag process, where I’d reorganized an unprocessed library of events so that—instead of having what my EMDR therapist termed “memory networks,” which defy processing because they’re so far-reaching and tangled-up and messy—they’d been felt through, organized, categorized and tagged, the way I’d organize an actual home library of books or DVDs.

I’d had every faith and trust that I wouldn’t accidentally die in the midst of this process, but others understandably did not share that faith, and I’d made the poor decision of ‘posting through it’, which was excruciating for others to watch. So people were coming toward me wanting to ‘help’, wanting to interrupt a defrag process: to stall it. Because they were fixers who were scared.

I could not let them stop me, I explained. More to the point, I’d gotten very angry at any attempts to interrupt the process before it’d completed. And of course I had to go through this, I had to become very angry—so that I could see my repeated interruption of others’ healing processes, no matter how ugly those processes appeared, was something I had to nip.

Then I’d phoned my best friend to give her a heads-up. I’d waited for the house to be empty—to be left alone, in the safest possible place, without any ponderous responsibilities to others, my nervous system basically at rest—and I was warning her that if anyone did come in, they’d be walking in on something that looked very frightening but that I was going to be OK. My best friend was indeed worried now⁵, but she suppressed all her motherly instincts long enough to apprehensively tell me OK, good to know.

Then a friend had sat up all night with me while I unloaded and unloaded, tackling my own demons by feeling my way through blindly. (“I tanked Jenn for eight hours,” she told me later, feeling a mix of real pride and let’s not do that ever again. “Oh, like I was the dungeon boss?” I asked her sadly—this is just an approximation of the conversation. “Or do you mean you tanked the dungeon with me?” She admitted she hadn’t thought of it as partying-up. That was a nice thought, she said.)

“So we do not interfere,” I was telling my friend now, pinching the air in both hands and pulling it down toward me, the universal gesture for sucking it up and grounding into ourselves. Even when it looks really fucked up. (Maybe we make exceptions for calling 911; maybe that turns out to be part of someone’s whole process. Like, I don’t know. Do you trust this person? Are you capable of trusting them with themselves long enough to do their thing? Will they like you very much anymore if you’ve revealed you don’t trust them to their own devices for two seconds? These are the questions.)

Then she admitted that she’d already gotten in trouble for “meddling”—I’m describing a potentially lurid web now—when she’d needled someone else to text the object of his affection. His declaration had gone poorly, so she’d been given the brunt of responsibility.

“Oh, I would’ve told him to wait,” I blurted out by accident, shuddering and raising my hands to my face. Weeks earlier he’d asked me for my advice, and I’d kind of sat there, not exactly unmoved, but also refusing to give any. (“I don’t know what timeline we’re on,” I’d finally said to him.)

“Why didn’t you tell him that?” she screeched.

“Because we’re not! fixing! things!” I said, clapping my hands for emphasis, and she reacted, “oh!” and ducked, putting both hands on the top of her head for cover.

I laughed. No mistakes had been made so far. I hesitated. I asked my friend what she knew about various myths and, finally, I asked her what she knew about Sophia’s fall to Earth. Since I’d already passed the line of what I consider normal conversation a while ago, I laid out the plot points bare. Anyway, now Sophia is trapped here doing penance, trying in vain to fix the whole shitty thing she wrought.

“It makes a lot more sense this way,” my friend said thoughtfully. “The creation story, I mean.” The Gnostics believed the wrathful god in that story might not be the real deal, that he might be a pale simulacrum of a higher god, here presiding over a simulation. A standardized Bible certainly suggests this interpretation, so maybe trying to guess at who really said what, and what to call them, is a fool’s errand.

“If you think about it,” I said, “the imperfect reality, which is just a shade of real reality, like Plato’s cave, is patriarchy, and what we call patriarchy is just sick dad energy.” Compliance for the sheer sake of compliance; don’t ask any follow-up questions or I’ll take all your toys away; I made children just so they’d be obligated to serve me on hand and foot; this is all generational, a disease that is handed down; this is a punishment, it’s god’s curse and his will; blah blah blah I’m a scared little baby and I’m scared I might be all alone in here. I’m mad! I’m god! There aren’t any higher-ups; it stops here!

It’s all a trickle-down economy, a sick tree, where we’ve normalized these abuses and insecurities, pass it on. I have half a mind to phone up the corporate office. (“I’m not saying it’s a failure of middle-management, but that’s what I’m saying,” I told a priest friend several months ago. Surprised, he let me know that’s how a certain type of orthodoxy arranges a heavenly hierarchy, a chain of command.)

“Actually, I guess it’s all sick parent energy,” I corrected myself, thinking about how much more destructive patriarchy can be once all the genders are in on it, caping for it. Whatever you call the mad god in charge, this guy sucks, this guy is Bezos. “The people yearn for healthy dad energy,” I said now. “So yeah! That’s what we’re all up against.” I sighed, rubbing my eyebrows.

Next up for me is tackling my own fawn response, which is part and parcel of unconsciously attempting to manage others’ internal states, rather than simply witnessing them with curiosity and interest.

We were getting off the horn when she thanked me for my insights. It was true that I’d insighted a lot harder than I usually do.

“Thank you for asking for my insights, and for appreciating them,” I said gratefully.

“Anyone who doesn’t appreciate your insights is a moron,” she said.

I smiled coyly, deeply flattered by her assessment. “I so agree,” I said to her.

Yesterday morning a friend messaged the group chat. “The latest Valley episode is a Danny special,” she said, not elaborating.

I’m several episodes behind this season, having only seen that first episode establishing the leitmotifs of season three. “Oh boy oh boy,” I replied to the group. “I’ll have to catch up.”

“It’s definitely as you say,” she continued, referring to the dark pattern of behavior. “I feel like being trapped by 4 kids under 5 is a bit too much.” Then: “I don’t know what I’d do with this douche.”

“I’m vindicated,” I replied. Because I never liked him, not “since season 1 when I realized what he was all about.”