May our children never know even an inkling of the difficulties of raising them until they are well and truly adults with their own children…

…but. Sometimes you just gotta lay out exactly how much work you do and sacrifices you’ve made that they don’t see, so they don’t try some advanced-level emotional manipulation on you about it.

I try not to describe young children as manipulative, exactly, unless I mean it as a totally value-neutral term for, you know, how their little brains instinctively know how to push our buttons to get what they need. But, Momo’s cresting out of “young” child and beginning to purposefully put a little english on her arguments, so shortly after the events that inspired this comic we had to have our first talk about emotional manipulation; namely, that you can’t simply win an argument by hurting or exhausting the other person until they give in. I think it worked? We’re going through a pretty unprecedented period of mutual understanding right now, which has been a bit of a revelation in our relationship. Isolation is certainly forcing us to find… you know, new ways of understanding each other.