Daddy's Girl

Nobody ever said parenthood would be a cakewalk, or even much fun. My son, who just turned 17, is finally beginning to walk, talk, and act like a human being. My 12-year-old daughter, on the other hand, has overnight turned into a she-devil. One moment she’s calling me “Daddy” in her sweet little girl voice, and the next she’s screaming, “you’re a sonofabitch” and trying to kick me in the groin.

Before slamming the door to her room, my daughter has this to say: “All you and mom care about is my education!” Guilty as charged, kid, guilty as charged. The child is upset because her math teacher recommended her for an after school math class. Instead of taking this recommendation as an offer of help, my daughter takes it as a form of punishment, like being drawn and quartered or tied to the back of a mule and dragged through a field of cactus. “Don’t you want to get better at math?” my wife and I ask. “I don’t give a crap about math!” shouts our daughter.

Behind the locked door of her room my daughter wails. To escape the noise I go outside to the deck, but I can still hear the kid; I’m sure everyone in our neighborhood can hear the kid, and half of them are probably dialing 911 to report a homicide in progress. By agreeing, happily and with gratitude, to place her in the after school math program, we have sentenced her to an extra hour of school, every day for two excruciating weeks.

Why can’t we understand what this means?

We are tyrannical parents, unfeeling brutes, though I’m pretty sure the kid will thank us later. Our son is finally coming around, proving that there is hope. For several months I feared the boy was lost to us, as if aliens had swiped his soul and replaced it with their evil spawn. I swear he was barely recognizable. Every time I saw him I wanted to ask, “Who are you and what are you doing in my kitchen?”

If our experience with our son is any guide, we have approximately four years of hell ahead of us. We can expect to be second-guessed, insulted, slighted, ignored and blamed for everything wrong under the moon. When our daughter forgets to pull her overripe gym clothes from her backpack until Monday morning, three minutes before she must leave for school, the fault will lie with us for not reminding her.

This isn’t the saccharine stuff of Hallmark cards. Some nights I look back with nostalgia to the days when it was my wife, our Jack Russell terrier, and me. The dog ate a couple of pairs of shoes, devoured one fine fountain pen, and shredded his share of carpet, but at least he never called me a sonofabitch.