#father disciplining his daughter but more like a husband berating his wife.

[diorstarr]

"I felt like I had something that my father wanted to take from me. I had something he didn’t have, and he wanted it. I felt that way sometimes with other men later in my life. That they were trying to take something from me." - The Incest Diary

[carewyncromwell]

“If I tell the truth, then I will have to tell you this: Though I grieve, and I believe I feel it truly, But I knew that ship was empty By the time it hit the rocks... We could not hold on when fate became unruly. So consider me a widow, boys, and I have told you why. Does the weather say a better day is nearing? I'll set my house in order now and wait upon the Will --  It's clear that I need better skill in steering...”

~“Widow’s Walk,” by Suzanne Vega

x~x~x~x

Lane Bach (née Cromwell) had been raised in a very abusive magical clan devoid of sincere and selfless love. Despite this, she managed to escape the suffocating, iron-fast control of Charles Cromwell by running away from home and eloping with a Muggle named Evan Bach. Evan swept Lane off her feet, far away from Yorkshire, like a knight-in-shining-armor. With Evan by her side, Lane created a new life for herself in the Muggle World, and actually lived very happily without her magic with her new husband and her precious son, who she and Evan named Jacob. Unfortunately the cracks in the Bach marriage started to appear when Jacob first started showing signs of magic.

When Jacob was first conceived, Evan was initially excited to be a father: to play catch with his boy and teach him how to drive and all the other classic father-son-type activities. Unfortunately Evan had been raised more by his now-deceased great-uncle than his own father, who’d been in prison since Evan was a boy -- so Evan honestly had no guidance about how to be a parent. And thus when Jacob started supposedly “acting out,” Evan didn’t know how to properly discipline him, and ended up resorting to berating Jacob and taking away whatever privileges he could...even if those “privileges” were things that were constructive outlets, like Jacob’s favorite books or chemistry set. Evan also interpreted Jacob’s constant insistence that he didn’t do anything wrong as him actively avoiding responsibility for his actions, which frustrated Evan all the more, since he feared Jacob wouldn’t ever become better if he kept doubling down on his bad behavior. Evan was determined to make sure Jacob didn’t become a screw-up like his father had been, and was determined to mold Jacob in his image so as to prevent that outcome. But the more Evan badgered Jacob to “stop acting out,” the more Jacob would withdraw from his father and act petulant just to stick it to both him and his teachers who refused to believe him when he said he’d done nothing wrong. Lane -- who of course understood the real reason behind Jacob’s supposed “misbehavior” but was forbidden to speak of it -- tried very hard to soothe Evan and shield Jacob from his temper, but this only served to make it so that Evan often felt his wife was taking their son’s side against him, rather than supporting her husband: coddling Jacob and making Evan look like a “bad guy” that Jacob could hate rather than showing a united front that might prompt him to be the upstanding son he should be. Evan had “rescued” Lane from her unhappy life with a family she told him had mistreated her, but he had no idea how to “rescue” his son from his road toward ruin. 

This dynamic was unpleasant, but relatively stable, but it shifted significantly again when, around Jacob’s eighth birthday, Lane ended up pregnant with her and Evan’s second child, Carewyn. Unfortunately this time Evan was far less enthused. In the years since Jacob was born, Evan had been very disillusioned by the supposed “joy” of fatherhood. Not only had he completely messed up with his son Jacob, who was as different from him as he could possibly be and openly disrespected him, but he had even less clue about how to deal with a daughter than he had a son. The idea of failing again the way he had with Jacob was something Evan just couldn’t handle...and so, when Carewyn was born, he buried himself in his work at his department store and emotionally plugged out of his baby daughter’s life. Even though Evan still lived with her, Carewyn was entirely raised by Lane and by Jacob, who immediately jumped in to help his mother look after his baby sister. Even as an adult, if anyone asks Jacob about his father, Jacob will attest that as much as he hates Evan for how he treated him, he hates him far, far more for how much he cast Carewyn aside like she didn’t matter. Lane tried more than a few times to bridge the gap between Evan and their children, but it often resulted in Lane and Evan once again coming to a stand-off regarding Jacob and his “misbehavior” or in Evan showing Carewyn some half-hearted affection and then retreating right back into his work. Evan forgot both of Carewyn’s birthdays he was present for, and only got her a Christmas present -- a book of fairy tales -- with some prompting from Lane. Even then, however, it was Jacob who ended up reading those fairy tales to Carewyn, not Evan. 

What broke the Bach marriage once and for all, however, was the arrival of Jacob’s Hogwarts letter in the fall of 1975. The revelation that Jacob was a wizard, and that all of the strange incidents he’d been blamed for over the years had actually been the result of magical accidents, filled Jacob with such an unbelievable amount of vindication and validation. He finally knew why all of these bad things happened to him, and better yet, he now knew he wasn’t the only one who experienced that sort of stuff! His own mother said she’d done weird things too, at his age, and best of all, that it was normal! That all young witches and wizards -- hundreds upon thousands of them, all over the world, went through the exact same thing! 

But rather than feeling happy for his son, or shocked, or even confused, like Lane had expected...Evan felt like he’d been slapped hard in the face. He didn’t just feel hurt that Lane hadn’t told him -- he felt betrayed. No matter how much Lane told him that she wasn’t legally allowed to -- no matter how much she insisted that she would’ve told him the day they’d first met, if she could have -- it didn’t matter. Evan had swooped into her rescue because she’d needed him -- how could she have needed him, if she could do magic? 

Lane’s response was very quiet and grim. 

“Magic isn’t all powerful, Evan. And even if it were...my entire family can do it too.”

As sensible as Lane’s answers were, and as apologetic as she was that she had to keep her ancestry from him, nothing seemed to soothe Evan. He was supposed to be the man of the house -- providing for his family, leading them and taking charge -- he’d already had a hard enough time of it with Jacob being so stubborn and obstinate, but now it turned out he had these supernatural powers Evan wouldn’t be able to control? And worse, Evan’s own wife ended up having these same powers too -- ones he could never hope to keep contained?

It was then that -- in the midst of this argument where Lane had only ever tried to pacify and deescalate -- Evan asked the worst possible question he could’ve thought up.

“...What about our daughter? Is she still normal? Is there a way to just...stamp out anything, before she...?”

Lane, who never learned how to properly express anger, shut down all of her emotion at that point. Any love she felt for Evan and had tried to express disappeared completely, and she spoke with a kind of detached, unemotional coldness that made her sound more like a Cromwell than she had in years. 

“Winnie is as normal as her brother and I are, and I will not stand here and listen to you insinuating otherwise. You wouldn’t even need to ask if Winnie had magic if you had ever bothered getting to know her, rather than making more and more mistakes just trying to escape from your previous ones.  And believe you me, Evan -- you will make a terrible mistake if you make one move toward taking my Winnie away from me.”

The very next morning, Evan Bach was gone. He’d packed up all of his belongings and left his family for good, never to be seen again. 

Not long after, Lane -- with some financial help from her old school friend, Judy Castine -- was able to buy herself, Jacob, and Carewyn a tinier flat in Liverpool, and the three started their lives anew, albeit much, much more modestly than before. Lane had to scrape together enough money for them to live on with odd jobs as a magical historian, frequently being forced to leave Carewyn alone at home as a latch-key kid. Jacob had to rely on Hogwarts’s impoverished students’ fund for his school supplies, and Carewyn grew up only owning three dresses that she had to wear multiple times in a week. Despite this, the three were an inseparable family, cherishing their winter holidays together where they could sing Christmas carols, watch Christmas movies on TV, and eat a modest Christmas dinner complete with a chocolate Yule Log. And even when this tiny family was tested and threatened by the shadow of the Cromwell Clan, Lane, Jacob, and Carewyn Cromwell’s greatest strength remained in their knowledge of sincere, selfless love, which they first learned from each other.