A couple of weeks ago I planned what I thought was a thoughtful, single father's entertaining night out with his two daughters. I cleared the evening on my own calendar, gave the girls advance notice, and we scooped the cinematic offerings at the local mall theatre several days in advance. Our choices were meager, but we still managed to find a flick that met the minimum bar for all three of us.
Choosing a movie, in itself, is not an easy task. Consider first that the target audience age group in our case is a 47 year-old father, my 13-going-on-anything-older girl Megan, and my 9 year-old Kylee. If you were to remove any one of the three, the choices are much easier; I can sit through any animated movie that my youngest craves, and my oldest wants to see most of the age-inappropriate movies that I would enjoy. Without me in the mix, the default option is no movie at all, as Megan would refuse to endure any form of entertainment with her sister. But choose we did, a couple of days ahead, and I relished a couple of days of contentment, where last minute planning or scrambling for something fun for us all to do together had been avoided and we simply had to enjoy.
That day at work I whistled, hummed, smiled even. I looked forward to the evening. Work flew by, and before I knew it, it was time to pick up the girls from school. In the car we recapped the day's events, significant or not, and tried to decide what we wanted to eat before the movie. Dinner plans were absent in my preparations, so we muddled our way through a discussion of what to eat that resembled a married couple's typical back and forth indecisiveness. The age difference between my daughters makes this a struggle; besides frequent and finicky changes in taste, I also have to negotiate differences created purely in the pursuit of sibling rivalry. My default tactic is making the choice myself on something I know they both will eat but refuse to agree on simply because the other suggests or likes it.
We settled on fast food, leaving us with a substantial time gap between the end of the meal and the start of the movie. What to do with our time? I suggested shopping, maybe just strolling the mall, a seemingly benign and simple idea that would kill time. Or so I thought. Silly me.
What happened next, or at least the depth and power of it, was nothing short of shock and awe. Even as a younger child Megan was fairly mild-mannered in her disagreements, rebellions, or misbehavior in public. This head-spinning, demonically possessed creature in the restaurant in no way resembled that Megan. In the middle of our high calorie, immediate consumption meal, and in full view of all the other families there for the same gratification, Megan erupted, emotionally spewing every conceivable objection to our going to the mall ahead of time. Not only that, but she objected just as vehemently to even going to the movie at all.
I bit my tongue. I glanced around at several of the other parents there, wondering if they were mentally dialing child services to report an emotionally abused teenage girl. I was too taken back by the sudden explosion of refusal to even muster any viable argument. I listened, absorbed the blows, and then quietly gave the order to head to the car. On the way to the car I mentally loaded all of my rhetorical guns as a means of keeping my head from exploding.
The ensuing argument involved two opposing forces: a father that wants to have quality time with two daughters he hopes he is arming with a healthy amount of self-esteem, and the almighty and ageless power of the teen girl culture.
I'd like to report that I won. But I can't.
When Megan later admitted to me that her real objection was that she would be seen at the mall by her friends--whom I loathed at the moment and refused to believe were the caliber of people that could ever be considered as friends and would never set foot in my home again--I was dumbfounded. I'd known her to be susceptible to peer perceptions, but had always tried to help her understand and deal with them within the context of how it made her life and interaction with others better. I was the objective outsider trying to offer her insight. But now, it was entirely different: I was suddenly a central figure in the war for my daughter's social status, self-esteem, and quality of life as she perceived herself within what I refer to as the maelstrom of the Middle-School Social World.
I probably should have checked my feelings before I moved an inch further, but I failed to do so. I looked across the battlefield and saw my opponents as a pack of giggling, doe-eyed, pubescent girls clad only in Abercrombie jeans riddled with holes and tanks tops with a little moose on the chest. I, on the other hand, was well-armed with the countless books, numerous women advisers, lore galore, and my own sense of right and wrong (and sense of reasonable fashion). The result of my seeing it in that manner only made matters worse. It made it a night filled with argument that was interrupted only by Kylee and I leaving ("I'll be damned if this is going to ruin everyone's evening!"), trying to enjoy a movie, and then returning to pick up the armor again.
It wasn't until we were both battle weary that I took the smarter path toward examining why I felt...threatened. Yes, threatened. I felt threatened by the culture of teenage girls that was stealing away the admiration and worship of my little girl. I even argued as much to my daughter, that she was placing them in a position higher than the family, using "family" where I was too stupid to admit that I really meant me. After the fact, I felt a little ridiculous that I was unable to recognize or admit this to myself at the right moment, and that I exasperatingly tried to convey this to an equally entrenched little girl (I still get to call her that) trying to determine her place in the pecking order of a world I was completely ignorant about.
And that made it all the more difficult to swallow. I had to admit that I was, and will for some time be, an outsider of what defines the most important part of her life as she sees it right now. It would not matter if I were a rock-star-ultimately-cool-best-dressed dad that possessed and did everything that she and her friends idolized, I would by the very existence of the title "dad" be the equivalent of a belt-mounted slide rule or pocket protector for her.
Smack!
When things later settled and a little cuddling and calm discussion could be managed, I finally had the humility to ask Megan how we could reach a compromise, fully expecting that she would have either nothing to offer or would inform me of her departure from anything resembling our relationship of all these previous years. I was braced for the worst, but instead she stated lovingly that she understood my feelings, still wanted to do things with her sister and I (provided her social calendar was open), and loved us both just as much as she ever did. She just couldn't risk ruining her life being seen with us.
So now, we still go to movies, but we go to the theatre in a mall some twenty minutes north of here. Sometimes I can even pay attention to what is on the screen. But most of the time I find myself stealing glances at the two of them, a little amazed at how now, at least for a little while, the student has become the teacher.
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