fathers and daughters
Oct 14
Passed on to me by a dear friend.
I will have to endure this, not once, but twice.
Please pray God gives me serenity in that time.
The other night my daughter was crying her head off, molars cutting through gums that just didn’t see a need for more teeth. My wife went in the nursery, but outside I could still hear the wailing. After several minutes of this, I went in and said, “Let me give it a shot.” Daughter in arms, we rocked and I whispered “Shhhh…” over and over in her ear until she calmed down. Then she turned her head up a little, she looked up into my eyes and I knew we were falling in love even more. She just reclined there in the crook of my arm and contentedly studied my face. In that moment I was everything she needed. There was not a question you could ask her where the answer wasn’t “Daddy.” In that moment, I became the only man that mattered in her life. Being that man was the most important thing in my life and nothing, absolutely nothing was going to come between me and my daughter. Making her happy, taking the tears away, that’s what I do, and I’m very good at it.
A popular pastime for members of my family is to point out to me that boys will want to date her. It’s fun for them seeing me overreact and make vain promises that she’ll date over my dead body. But boys will want to date her. Why wouldn’t they? She’s beautiful. But she doesn’t need to date because she’s already got a man in her life. Me. I’m all she needs and that smile on her face says so. In the afternoon, after lunch when I’m staving off the strong desire to nap, my mind is filled with little daydreams of meeting young men–punks really–at the door and explaining to them the extents to which they are mistaken if they think they are leaving that house with my daughter. Someone else’s daughter, yeah, go ahead, but I know how boys think. I was a boy. You will not get anywhere near my daughter if you think like I did. And I know you think like I did. Punk.
In the course of rocking my daughter, however, I got past that little gun-cleaning fantasy to a much more devastating realization. If I do my job, if I provide for my daughter the happiness she wants and that I want for her…at some point–through no fault of my own–I’m no longer going to be able to make her happy. It won’t be for lack of effort on my part. It will be because she will have grown up, and no matter how many books I read or how cool I try to be, she’s going to need something else. Someone else. My time will have simply passed.
The tragedy of this, for me anyway, is that there is going to have to be a moment when I meet that boy at the door and rather than block his entrance, I do nothing but hold that door open. Because he can make her happy in a way I cannot. If I can shed that selfish pride, I can still make her happy by stepping aside and just supporting her while another man puts that smile on her face. Is that how I want it to be? No. Hell no. But I can’t have it my way. So at some point, I’m going to choose her way. Because I love her.
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