Here's your baby daughter! (Blink) Here's your adult daughter!

Even after this long I still have no idea what I'm doing as a parent

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Here’s your daughter! (Blink) Here’s your adult daughter!

My older daughter turned 18 recently, and the day before her birthday, she said, “this is my last day as a child,” and …

Blink …

I don’t care how inaccurate this memory is I think it’s true therefore it is. She took absolutely forever to be born. She had her hand on her forehead, and it acted like a brake.

Almost out, back in.

Almost out, back in.

Finally she spat out all at once, like a stunt man shot from a cannon, and I swear she floated slowly through the air, the meconium glistening in the light, until the doctor caught her like a goalie in hockey. (Glove save, and a beauty!)

My wife and I were pretty sure what we wanted to name her but waited until she was born to 100 percent decide to make sure she “looked like” the name we had chosen. Then I held her and I thought she looked exactly like my dad and lamented we were going to have the only little girl in the world named Richard.

Blink …

There’s nothing worse than parenting advice, but I will suggest this, which I learned when she was about 5: Buy a lawn chair for yourself and a couple to share. Bring them to the park when you take your kids there. Invite other parents to sit with you and talk. Bring a bag of clementines and share them.

Blink …

The fact she is turning 18 doesn’t make me feel old. Being old makes me feel old. I trick myself into feeling younger, though, because several of my friends who are 10 years younger than I am have kids about the same age. So I have convinced myself that we’re peers.

I highly recommend that.

I have completely and totally forgotten and never ever ever dwell on the fact that I have other friends who are grandparents and are younger than me.

Blink …

I still remember the first time I made her cry. It was October 14, 2006, and I held her as I watched my team, the Detroit Tigers, play for a chance to go to the World Series. They were up three games to none, and in the bottom of the ninth inning of a tied Game 4 of the ALCS, Tigers slugger Magglio Ordonez stepped to the plate.

I set her in her bouncy seat in case I needed to celebrate.

Within seconds, Ordonez hit a walk-off home run. I jumped out of my seat and screamed. She woke up and started crying.

That moment is the highlight of my sports-watching life, not least because her symphonic protestations gave it an unforgettable soundtrack.

Blink …

I have never known rage – pure, hot, dark, evil rage – like I did when I heard a boy teasing her at the park. She was maybe 6, and it was the first time I had ever heard anyone who wasn’t me speak unkindly to her. 

I don’t remember what he said, but it was pure bully. He was not teasing her or making fun of her, he was trying to hurt her feelings. Or so I thought anyway. So I decided to hurt his.

I am a Grade A Smartass, and I was going to put that talent to great use hopefully in such a way that he cried and his friends laughed at him for the rest of his life. If all went well, I would damage him emotionally.

This moment is strong enough in my memory that it seems like it lasted a long time. It was really only a few seconds, and somehow I calmed down before I said something monumentally stupid. I like to think I stopped because I knew it was wrong and not because the park was full of witnesses (some of them sitting on my lawn chairs eating my clementines).

Blink …

Parenting is like learning to juggle three chainsaws, then four, then five, then six, then they turn on a strobe light, then they put you on a Tilt-A-Whirl, then it starts raining, then a hurricane comes in, then one of your arms fall off, then while you’re doing all that they empty your bank account, then while you’re broke and still juggling six chainsaws one-armed during a rainy hurricane on a Tilt-A-Whirl with a strobe light, they move away and only come back to borrow all your stuff and never return it and never call or answer your calls or even send emojis back to your texts.

Blink …

I still want to know what “hockamomo” means.

When my wife was pregnant with her, I daydreamed constantly about her growing up and being old enough to talk. I could not wait for her to tell me what happened at school, at her friend’s house, at the playground, whatever. I have spent my career talking to people to uncover their stories, and hers was the one I most wanted to know. What would she be like? What would I be like? What would we be like?

I gave those imagined conversations places and context. She was about 10, and we were standing in a kitchen (though not any kitchen I’ve ever had) and she always had on a black t-shirt. She had blonde hair (which turned out to be true) and was, um, short (ditto.)

All along, I imagined those conversations would be in English.

Silly me.

Then she was born, and she started talking, and I didn’t know what the heck language she was speaking.

I used to think my friends who translated what their kids said were faking it. How did you get that from that? Not anymore. I figured out “payguns” meant grapes. I figured out that “mo-goose” meant either Mother Goose or marshmallow, depending on the context. But context can also be deceiving. Witness the following exchange, which hand on the Bible happened:

Me: “Do you want milk?”

Daughter: “Stepstool.”

There was one word that I never figured out: hockamomo. Hockamomo means something. It means something big, something fabulous, something mindblowingly important. And because she has long since stopped saying it, I’ll never know what that something is.

I don’t know what skibidi means either, but thankfully I don’t care.

Blink …

If I could take one smile of hers and implant it in her memory (and mine), it would be the one I describe here.

Blink …

Parenting is like life in that you start off ignorant, and the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know, until you come to the unsettling conclusion that the ratio of what you know to what you don’t know has actually gotten worse, and therefore your perception of yourself is that you’re dumber for having gotten lots of experience. It’s like playing whack-a-mole only the mole is a dragon that keeps getting bigger and your hammer isn’t a hammer at all but a piece of spaghetti that breaks even if you don’t hit anything.

Blink …

No, I don’t know where she’s going to college and no, neither does she, and we’ve both answered that question quite enough, thank you. If any one reading this is an admissions official at a great school who is dying to give away fat scholarships, you’ll get a darling and brilliant young woman with killer test scores, a high GPA, a penchant for crying at Tigers games, acting experience and a unique vocabulary.