Part
A:
30 Reasons For a Father Not to Have a
Daughter
(1) She’ll decide to be
born at the end of January, in Oregon, in the middle of a
serious snowstorm, and you’ll have to put chains on your car
to get to the hospital, foreshadowing the chains she soon will
be forging around your life, plus she wants to leap out of the
womb so quickly, eager to get going on her malevolent plans,
that the obstetrician you and your wife have spent so many
months getting to know, and have had heartfelt discussions
with about the meaning of the childbirth that you will
experiencing together, doesn’t have time to get to the
hospital because labor is so abbreviated, and you will end up
with a complete stranger of an obstetrician who just happened
(thank god) to be at the hospital when the Little Wonder took
it in her mind to pop out for a visit to this earthly
plane.
(2) She will be born
round-faced with a shockingly thick head of black hair,
leading well-wishers to say, with depressing regularity, “Oh,
so you decided to adopt an Eskimo? How kind of you,” and
undoubtedly to think, with equal regularity, “I didn’t know
their milkman was an Eskimo.”
(3) Proving that the
cosmos has a sense of humor, she will be raised by two
vegetarians, who all-too-soon will discover that the one food
group their daughter absolutely despises, and has to be coaxed
beyond belief to even put in her mouth, is…vegetables.
(4) The day after you take
care of her all Saturday afternoon, while her mother has her
nails done or something, and she cries non-stop for four
hours, even after you’ve changed her diaper, fed her, put her
in her crib, gotten her out of her crib, read to her, sung to
her, walked her, threatened her with eternal hellfire if she
doesn’t stop her damned wailing, and, finally, shaken her
little body in an inexcusable, but uncontrollable, fit of
frustration, a newsmagazine will arrive in the mail featuring
a story on “Brain damage and baby-shaking,” after which you
will feel responsible for every low grade on her report card,
from kindergarten all through college.
(5) Two scary words:
stinky poop.
Also: wriggly baby. Plus: safety pin. And: skin
piercing. Culminating with: Want Mommy!
(6) You will listen to the
recorded tale of Bambi and the forest fire that kills her deer
parents so many times in a row that you will have serious
thoughts of giving up vegetarianism, buying a rifle and lots
of ammunition, and slaughtering as many of those damn animals
as you can, then turning your sights on whoever first designed
the little tape players that are simple enough for small
children to use on their own.
(7) You will give up
praying for world peace, praying for the poor, praying for
enlightenment, and praying for whatever else you used to pray
for, because all your psychic and spiritual energy will be
devoted to a single goal: that you or your wife will call a
babysitter on Thursday night and hear the blessed words, “Yes,
I’m free tomorrow.”
(8) Once she learns how to
wrap presents, kind of, she will take your wedding ring, tell
you that she wants to give you a gift, disappear into her room
with a small box and wrapping paper, and you will never see
your ring again, no matter how hard you look.
(9) When you ask her what
she wants to play before she goes to sleep, she will say
“cars,” at which point your heart will leap into your chest,
because you’ve had a tough day at work, and “cars” requires so
much concentration and attention to detail, you’d rather jump
up and go right back to work, because then your mind could
rest (since you are a state government worker), but you smile
and say, “sure,” and go about drawing the streets on the
blackboard, and adding houses, stores, parks, schools, stores,
and so much else, then populating the blackboard town with
figures of little people, each of whom has a story, and
relationships with the other people, all of which you have to
make up afresh every time you play “cars,” and god help you if
your oh-so-tired brain gets the storyline wrong along the way,
because your sweet little girl will instantly pout and scream,
“No, Dad! Sweetums’ best friend, other than Poopface, is not Wrinkletoes; it is
Farkle—don’t you remember!!??”, and of course you don’t,
because all you want to do is latch onto a plot device that
will kill off all the little imaginary bastards at once in
some horrendous blackboard gas main explosion, so you can get
your daughter off to bed, and watch some TV by
yourself.
(10) You will rue the day
you ever thought up the bedtime entertainment of “Bisneyland,”
especially when a friend of hers spends the night, and you
have to twirl two
girls around in a blanket, emulating as best you can rides
made out of actual machinery at the real Disneyland, which
produce considerably more
power than your aching arms can, not to mention the prospect
of (further) daughterly brain damage is ever-present in your
mind as you spin them around in the blanket in the pitch dark,
now emulating the Haunted House, hoping you are remembering
where the bedposts and sharp cabinet edges are.
(11) You will learn more
about dog economics that you ever wanted to know when cocker
spaniel puppy A is bought through an ad in the newspaper, and
daughter-who-wanted-puppy-A promises with all her heart to
feed it, and brush it, and walk it every single day, yet
doesn’t, for even a single day, and you quickly put an ad in
the newspaper offering to sell the cocker spaniel puppy, at
which point the market value of cocker spaniel puppies
immediately plummets from hundreds of dollars to absolutely
zero, at which point you give the freakin’ thing away, and she
gets a hamster (which is another story).
(12) No matter what kind of
restaurant you are in, after reading the entire menu to her,
she will say, “I just want plain spaghetti, with butter” (try
explaining this request to your Chinese waiter).
(13) Forget about ever
winning another game of Monopoly, since an instant after she
lands on the Boardwalk property that you have taken such pains
and so much time to populate with hotels, and she glances at
the pitiful amount of money she has remaining, the board will
be overturned, pieces scattering everywhere, and she will
scream, “I quit! It’s a tie!”
(14) “Why, oh why,” you
keep asking yourself, “didn’t I invest in Kraft Macaroni and
Cheese stock the moment she was born, knowing what I do
now?”
(15) The ten-thousandth
time she asks, “Why didn’t you and Mommy have any other
children?,” and you respond, with a sickly sweet smile,
“Because, honey, we knew something perfect when we saw it,”
you will have to bite your lip so hard it bleeds to stop
yourself from blurting out, “Because, sweetie pie, when you
hit yourself on the thumb with a hammer, and it really hurts, you don’t want
to do it twice.”
(16) Whereas you used to
cruise around town peacefully listening to New Age music on
the radio, now, since she doesn’t have a drivers license yet,
but has lots of places she needs to go with her best friend,
your ears are subjected to the not-so-pleasant backseat sound
of incessant girl-giggling and locutions in a language that
bears some resemblance to English, but obviously isn't, which
makes you wonder if somehow you have given birth to an alien
who, after 15 years of reconnoitering, has linked up with one
of her own kind in order to plan the next phase of their plot
to rule Earth, which naturally can’t be discussed in any
language known to this planet, so it is cleverly disguised as
Teenage-ese, impenetrable to adult ears, whether they belong
to an FBI agent or just a plain old befuddled
father.
(17) After going out of
town for a few days, and leaving clear instructions, “No
parties!”, you will be struck by the number of beer caps that,
amazingly, must have fallen out of the sky and landed around
all of the bushes by your backyard deck, lifted into the air,
you surmise, by some sort of tornado striking a beer factory
and miraculously depositing the caps in your back yard, which
is, at least, the story your daughter tells you, and naturally
you believe her, being the gullible guy you are, until a small
shred of doubt begins to form after you find, tossed in the
high grass at the end of your driveway, a hand-lettered piece
of cardboard on a stake which reads, “Party HERE tonight!”
(18) She will manage to
graduate from high school, and be admitted to a university,
without being able to perform such fundamental activities of
daily living such as fixing her own breakfast, putting dishes
in the dishwasher, making her bed, or picking clothes up off
her floor, leading you to realize, way too late, that you
could have adopted a “mentally challenged” child who actually
could have learned
these things, and your life would have been a heck of a lot
easier.
(19) After you pay taxes in
Oregon for 18 years, playing a large part in maintaining the
high quality of the state’s institutions of higher learning,
she will decide to go to the University of Arizona, and you
will be writing out-of-state tuition checks for five
years.
(20) During her college
years, every friend you run into will also have a child in
college who is majoring in a field such as astrophysics,
pre-med, renaissance art, or ancient Greek, while you respond
to their query, “And what is your daughter majoring
in?” with a mumbled “fathwn markendice” and start to walk
away, until they run up and say they couldn’t understand you,
at which point you snap and scream, “Fashion Merchandising,
OK! Fashion Merchandising! Got a problem with that,
asshole?!”, which eventually cuts down on the number of
questions from friends about this subject, because now you
don’t have any friends.
(21 ) Needing a car in
college, or, at least, believing she needs a car, she will ask
your fatherly advice as to which sort of used vehicle to get,
and after you spend many hours researching Consumer Reports
and the Kelly Blue Book, plus countless car magazine reviews,
she will completely ignore you and buy an old Merkur XR4 ti,
or whatever the hell it is called, which you can’t exactly
recall because you never see these pieces of crap driving
around on the street, only in automobile museums, mostly
because you can’t find parts for a car that only 16 people
bought in this country at the height of its popularity, which
was aeons ago.
(22) You find yourself
thinking of forming a “Friends of Infanticide” club when, a
few months later, you get a call from college: “Dad, my Merkur
needs work and the mechanic says he can’t find the parts;
could you loan me money so I can get a Toyota Tercel?”, which
happens to be the exact car you recommended before.
(23) After tens of
thousands of tuition dollars have flowed from Oregon to
Arizona, she finally phones home from college with the words
you’ve been waiting for,
“Dad, I got an award!”, which makes your eyes well up
with tears of pride, until they change to tears of another
sort when she continues, “My sorority sisters gave it to me at
our senior ceremony: BIGGEST PARTY-ER!.”
(24) As she grows older,
you have to keep changing your criteria for looking at women
with lust in your heart: “OK, not anybody younger than my
daughter.”… “Nah, make that nobody more than five years
younger than my daughter.”… “Five years? Let’s say ten years.”
And eventually, you anticipate, it will all switch a
generation. “OK, not anybody younger than my granddaughter…”
(25) Your mailbox will be
filled to overflowing with letters from the CEOs of credit
card companies, thanking you from the depth of their heart for
having a daughter who contributes so much to their bottom
line, given that charging 18% interest when the fed funds rate
is 2%, or whatever, isn’t a bad way of making a
living.
(26) After she finally
graduates from college, and finds a well-paying job, making
her self-supporting for the first time in your life, leading
you to finally start shopping in aisles named other than
“Beans and Rice” at the supermarket, she will decide to quit
her job, pack up her cat and belongings in a U-Haul, and move
to Los Angeles without having a clue about what she will do
there, other than get a tan and look good (which is, you
realize, the most common profession in southern California,
but somehow you expected more from your one and only
daughter).
(27) You won’t be able to
ever buy dark glasses again, for you made the mistake of
glancing at an Oliver Peoples wholesale/retail invoice lying
on the floor of the car after she picked you up at the
airport, after having found a job, and you realize that those
$129 glasses sitting on your face must have cost the company
that made them, at most, 49 cents, though you must remember
that the situation is completely different with the product
your daughter is foisting, since those glasses sell for $300
(and also cost 49 cents to make).
(28) The image will never be erased
from your mind, no matter how much psychotherapy you undergo,
but, heck, it was your fault, asking the question, “So how did
you and your husband-to-be get together?”, and hearing the
story of how she and he met in Dallas, but they each had
boyfriends/girlfriends, blah, blah, blah, until they ran into
each other in Los Angeles again, and still had other
boyfriends/girlfriends, blah, blah, blah, and then they each
didn’t have anyone, so they would go out to dinner and a movie
just for something to do, until that night they were lying on
the bed in her apartment, watching a rental movie and eating
popcorn, and, she says, “We looked at each other, and we were
thinking, ‘Hey, instead of being just friends, maybe we could
be…um, so then we, um…”, and you scream, “OK, OK, I get the
picture!”
(29) You’ll get a phone call from her
fiancée, amazingly enough telling you that he has honorable
intentions toward your daughter, at least now that they gotten
way past the movie and popcorn bit, and he wants to marry her,
and even though he isn’t exactly asking your permission, at
least the whole conversation is wonderfully traditional and
sort of old-fashioned, but still, you’re a New Age sort of
guy, having had a simple wedding (all right, weddings) yourself,
once by a crazed Greek yoga teacher, and once by a Unity
minister, so it is music to your ears, and pocketbook, to hear
him say, “Yeah, we want to keep the wedding simple, probably
just have a BBQ on the beach the night before, and just a few
friends and family at the wedding the next day,” so later you
wonder what the hell happened, sitting there in a crowded
Beverly Hills restaurant, unable to enjoy your dinner because
you know how ridiculously much each bite is costing, but deep
down you do understand what happened: it was her.
(30) Four days before her
30th birthday, she will call you and say that she
is worried, because she hasn’t gotten very many cards and
presents, this from a girl who has never sent a birthday
card to her father so it is received on or before his actual
birthday, except perhaps for that memorable year when he was
so excited to see the Federal Express truck pulling up with a
envelope containing a hastily scrawled note, “Happy Birthday,
Dad; P.S. send some money quick, I’m overdrawn
again.”
Part
B:
30 Reasons For a Father to Have a
Daughter
See
above.
Celeste, I love you: truly, deeply,
fatherly. Happy 30th. It’s great to have a daughter
that you can send something like this too. Don’t spend the
rest of the day crying, except with joy. All that I thought of
has, with time, become a happy memory (with a few exceptions,
such as the Merkur).
Have a great day, and a great life, you
and Patrick both. Congratulations on your new job at Paramount
Studios, Patrick. Did I tell you I have this idea for a
screenplay? Let’s do lunch sometime. Looking forward to seeing
you this summer, if not before.
Love,
Dad/Father/Brian/Friend/Fellow soul/Whoever I
am
