I am, this week, recovering from a terrible row with our vet - a humourless, Messianic man who employs only very timid women at his practice. He’s been okay, (if a bit weird), for the last four years, but things have gone off-kilter the last few weeks: the practice have taken on too many clients and the administrative end of things has fallen to bits. We ended up snapping at each other because of that. Alas, I couldn’t tell him to go and completely fuck himself because he had my cat, Mo Tenzing, under sedation.
I try very hard not to lose my temper because it never helps - and I almost never do. You end up, if you are a normal person, feeling dreadful about it for days afterwards - even if you didn’t do anything that bad.
What could I have done differently? Why did I have to lose it like that? Note to self: next time just go: “Okay, thanks,” and leave. That is mostly what I do, that is mostly the right thing to do. Because if you say, “I’m really angry about how we’ve been treated, your practice has messed me about for days over this,” in a bit of a tough voice they will cry and tell on you and call you the crazy psycho hag lady Karen. It’s not fair, it’s totally sexist - but that’s just the way it rolls.
In situations like this I always wonder what the women I admire would do. What would Alison Loehnis, CEO of YOOX Net A Porter do? She is a very grand American - possibly even from actual New York - and will have no time for obstructive, computer-says-no twits. Maybe she’s smart enough to get someone else to take the dog to the vet. Or Anna Bateson, who is the publisher of the Guardian newspaper, to whom I defer on everything. She would kill them with her brand of razor-sharp politeness. Or would she? Would she, too, have said, “Stop treating me like you are doing me a favour by treating my animal. You are charging me a grand!”
I just want this situation to stop living rent-free in my head (as they say on the internet). I want to perform that Cherokee ritual where you waft burning herbs about yourself to cleanse evil spirits. Recovering from a row with a stranger is so time-consuming and tiring, when I have so much else to do, like move both my cats to another vet practice, (although Giles is doing this), and tend to my poor, poor broken cat, who had six teeth removed, (was this absolutely necessary??) although Giles is actually doing this, too.
On the plus side, I have recently been running out of things to talk to my therapist about: when I see him today he won’t know what’s hit him.
For example, I was deeply triggered by Mo’s procedure. Even though I had nothing to do with Mo’s actual - very grisly - operation, I delivered him to his fate in his cat-box. And it suddenly reminded me so powerfully of the time I had to knock Sam out for his adenoid removal when he was two years old. I had to hold a plastic mask over his little face and he howled and looked at me in horror as I clamped this thing over him Mummy what are you doing?? A single tear rolled down his little peachy cheek as he passed out.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Sam last night, as we all sat around looking at our new toothless, post-op, woozy cat staggering about. “I’m sorry I did that to you.”
“It’s alright,” said Sam, who is now ten, and suddenly looks enormous in his age 11-12 pyjamas. He put his arms around me. “It’s okay. I don’t remember any of it.” The idea that it is so far in his past that he can’t remember any of it, when it feels to me like it was a few weeks ago - six months max - is a mind-bend. I hope Mo Tenzing will forget all this soon, too.
How about you? What’s the worst row with a stranger you’ve ever had? And how did you recover? Please leave a story to amuse the group in the handy box below.
God I must be a psychopath. Helping the doctors with that little sweet-smelling gas thing for my son's grommets was one of the rare moments in those early years that I felt useful and important and part of something bigger than myself.
I have a ten year old son I had to take for an op at one, and I definitely haven’t recovered from that and it also feels like yesterday. And he has also just started to look enormous in his pyjamas. I had a huge argument years ago with a train guard who wouldn’t let me on a morning train knowing I’d miss it. I still think about it now. Also when my first was born and I hadn’t slept for three days I complained because the midwives let in visitors at all hours all day not just during visiting hours and I was so tired. And they were really hostile to me for the rest of my stay and it still bothers me. I was so tired and they hadn’t just had a baby for the first time and it felt so mean. I can also never have an argument without it bothering me for ages, in this case over a decade.