The following is a guest post for Dads Need To Know – a new series that I will bring you as often as possible!
As a father of twin daughters, I expected the teen years would be rife with difficulties. I knew that I would be challenged at every corner and in every possible way. Now that my daughters are approaching their teen years, I am being forced to deal with some realities that I was not totally prepared for. My girls are only eleven and barely qualified to be teenagers, but they still are throwing me curve balls already. Here are five things I did not expect as a Daddy:
I did not expect the manipulation
My girls have always been Daddy’s girls. They have always known how to play my heartstrings. That said, they have moved to another level of manipulation now. Now, they will actually play on my insecurities to get their way.
Example: We are in the store the other day and my daughter Valerie is looking through her latest “Teen Beat” magazine as I thumb through my football magazine. I look over at her and see her looking from the magazine to me and back again. I decide to investigate...
“Valerie, what are you doing? Why are you looking back and forth from me to the magazine?”
She looks up at me and sighs deeply… ”Oh nothing Daddy. I was just trying to find a man that is as good looking as you.”
Two minutes later I am buying her the magazine and fully whipped. Point made?
I did not expect the difficulty of the bra
Ultimately I knew my daughters would grow up physically and I thought I was prepared for that. That is, until my wife informed me that Brooke was wearing a trainer.
- Why exactly was that necessary?
- How did that happen?
- Why now?
- Can she wait until her sister is also going to need one?
These are all ignorant questions that either ran through my mind or was actually asked of my wife.
The poster kiss
When I was ten or eleven years old, I had a poster of Farrah Fawcett that I kept taped to the ceiling above my bed. As my hormones increased, so did my thoughts about that poster.
I walked in on Valerie the other day smooching her poster of Ross Lynch. Ross Lynch had best be glad he lives in Disney World and that is far, far away.
I am not going to survive the dating thing.
The hand holding thing
I have held my daughter’s hand virtually every where she has gone in life up to now. As we get older and she matures, her need to do so seems to diminish daily. I look forward to the day when she reaches out for my hand again without hesitation. For now, I have to settle for those moments at home when nobody is watching.
The utter joy of seeing them mature
I joke about the difficulties of being a daddy. It is a tough job and one that is bittersweet more often than I care to admit. That said, there is also an unexpected joy and total exhilaration that overcomes me as a Daddy to see them growing into beautiful young women. My girls are going to be awesome and I am simply going to have to accept that others see that too.
For now, can I pretend that I am all that matters for a while longer?
That is all I want, after all.
Living in Greensboro, NC, Rodney Southern has been living the writing dream for over a decade. He is a father to two ten year old twins and a husband to his beautiful wife Julie. His work has appeared in The Sporting News, Nicean Magazine and countless other online venues. He also won a National Call for Content award in 2008. After spending time in the Army serving his country as a medic, he focused his attention on the challenges of parenthood and the difficulties and blessings that can come with it.
