Being gaslit is one thing.

But being gaslit by your own child is on a whole new level.

My kids have recently watched a few episodes of Teletubbies and started discussing which Teletubby should be assigned to which member of our family.

(Let’s take a quick aside to appreciate the fact that my kids have somehow only just discovered Teletubbies, a show aimed squarely at toddlers, at the ripe old ages of 6 and 8.)

Pretty quickly, it was established that:

Nia = Tinky-Winky

Nathan = Dipsy

Katka (my wife) = Laa-Laa

This left me. So the kids proudly announced, “And you’re Ho, dad!”

“Ho?!” I thought to myself, “Surely a children’s show, especially one from as refined and proper a country as Britain pretends to be, would never call one of the characters ‘Ho.’”

“What’s his name again?” I asked.

“It’s a girl, dad. She’s Ho!” the kids replied in unison.

“Ho?” I said.

“Ho,” they confirmed.

I didn’t press the issue further right there and then.

But several hours later, armed with a smartphone and instant access to the world’s best repository of collective knowledge that is the Internet, I, a 42-year-old man, opened up a browser and typed the words “Teletubbies names” into the search bar.

Lo and behold, the names popped up on my screen. They were:

Tinky-Winky

Laa-Laa

Dipsy, and…

Show more

(The attached screenshot is proof that I didn’t make this twist up to create suspense.)

Clicking the “Show more” button finally revealed the name of the last Teletubby.

Her name, ladies and gentlemen, was Po.

“Nia,” I yelled across the room, excited to share my discovery, “The last Teletubby is called Po, not Ho!”

To which my daughter, without hesitation, replied, “I know that. That’s what I said. Po.”

“You guys said her name was H, Ho, but it’s P, Po!” I said, making sure to supplement my point with phonetic pronounciations of the letters H and P.

“Noooo,” Nia insisted, “Her name is Po.”

“Yes, but you told me it was Ho,” I continued by inertia, as it began to dawn upon me that I was now suddenly stuck trying to win a pointless argument against a 6-year-old.

“It’s Po,” Nia scoffed, “Not Mo!”

My already slipping grip on sanity wasn’t ready for that cuveball.

“I…I never said Mo. But you and Nathan told me earlier that she’s called Ho.”

“No, dad. It’s Po.”

“I KNOW THAT! IT’S YOU WHO WERE GRAVELY MISTAKEN AT AN EARLIER POINT IN TIME!” I screamed inside my head.

Out loud, I simply said, “Okay, good. So I’m Po, then.”

"Do you mean…Ho?” asked my only daughter, my flesh and blood, one I used to lovingly rock to sleep in her crib not so long ago.

“I. What? No. I mean Po. Her name is Po.”

“No it’s not!”

“I’m looking at it right here on my—”

“She’s Ho!”

“If you could just come take a—”

“No!”

This continued for a while, until I’d finally managed to get Nia to read the letters on my screen and acknowledge that Po was, in fact, the name of the last Teletubby.

I wish knowing this brought me peace.

But I feel this was a Pyrrhic victory.

In my quest to stubbornly press on instead of letting things go like the adult I was supposed to be, I lost a part of my soul.

As for Nia?

I’m pretty sure she’ll go right back to calling me “Ho” tomorrow morning.