Commentary
The Trials of the Father of a Daughter
By Mark W. Mayfield
Father's Day is almost here, and as I quietly contemplate the importance of being a patient, understanding, loving dad, I discover an undeniable truth: Patient, understanding, loving dads do not have 15-year-old daughters.
My ongoing battle with fatherly angst actually began at the moment of my daughter's birth, when I successfully resisted an instinctive urge to seize her from the obstetrician and conceal her newborn nakedness with my disposable spectator smock. (After all, several members of the delivery team were adult men who hardly knew my unclothed little girl.)
Fourteen years have passed since then, and I'm still fretting. My latest worries are sneaky little boys who think sneaky little thoughts in their sneaky little minds and exchange sneaky little comments with their sneaky little pals while they leer at pretty little girls. I want to wring their sneaky little necks.
I've already had "The Talk" with my daughter, the talk that all fathers eventually have with their female offspring, the one in which I gravely informed her that teenage boys are actually predatory space aliens from the planet Testosteroneus who were sent here to annihilate earth girls. (Testosteroneus is a sneaky little planet in the distant Pubescent galaxy.)
With my best reassuring tone, I explained that these horribly aggressive creatures will not attempt to annihilate girls protected by obnoxious, ever-present fathers armed with lethal anti-alien weapons, including baseball bats, pruning shears, shovels and gas-powered weed whackers. She laughed at me.
I then activated the Stand-by Emergency Talk, in which I tearfully confessed that I made up the story about teenage alien predators, but only to spare her the awful truth: that all males born after 1983 frequently emit a fast-acting airborne bacteria that's completely harmless to everybody except nearby teenage girls, who will immediately sprout permanent wire-like goat hair all over their bodies. She rolled her eyes in a feminine gesture of annoyance and said, "Yeah, whatever, dad." (Translation: "Father, I suspect you're being less than honest with me.")
Desperate, I reached way down into my bottomless bag of deceptive parenting techniques and pulled out a doozy. I told her that the Good Book says, "Any teenage daughter who shalt looketh at a man-child before her father sayeth it's OK will instantly turneth into a pillar of salt."
That plan didn't work because I incorrectly responded to her request for the exact location of that particular admonition. Apparently, the Bible doesn't contain "Second Philodendrons, Chapter 600, verse 1003."
What am I going to do? In a few too-short years, my innocent little girl has gone from despising boys to tolerating boys to speaking fondly about boys to openly talking with boys. This greatly troubles me because, in case you don't know, all boys are sneaky (except my son, a perfect little gentleman who should be allowed to leer at any girl, including your daughter, when he's older.)
My little girl is leaving childhood behind, and, as she continues her inevitable journey to womanhood, I'm wrestling with some troubling questions. Am I strange for ordering her to pick her nose, burp loudly and spit on the ground when boys are watching? Am I hopelessly old-fashioned for asking her to refrain from dating until after my death, or until senility prevents me from recognizing her?
Would it be illegal to ask her orthodontist to incorrectly adjust her braces, thereby ruining her beautiful smile?
Am I cruel for hiding her deodorant? Am I evil for filling her shampoo bottle with motor oil? Am I despicable for encouraging her to "walk like a hunchbacked duck?" Would she believe me if I told her that boys prefer girls with long skirts, crooked teeth, hairy armpits, greasy hair and poor posture?
Am I a sinner for trying to convince my daughter that cloistered nuns have more crazy, zany fun than anybody else in the world? Am I a lousy, stinkin', no-good, pathetic liar for telling her that football games, dances and other school activities are for losers?
And, finally, can I accept the fact that I will not always be the only man in my daughter's life? THAT is the toughest question of all. Happy Father's Day to me.
Mark W. Mayfield (itsmark@sirius.com), a freelance writer based in the badlands of Central California, was once a sneaky little boy.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
