Pater Familias … because I'm your FATHER!

Daughterized Dad #1

January 13, 2010 · Activities | Behavior | Influences

Has fathering female(s) changed your world?

Call That A Ballerina? Are They Nuts?

Somewhere, probably right here on Wrenmead Street, a dad and male progeny watch a playoff game on TV and scream abuse at some screwup idiot knucklehead jerk with no business in the game.

Half the fun, right? If televised sports didn’t give us reasons to throw dung, nobody would watch.

Well, Girl Child and I find exactly the same kind of entertainment going off on a picture on Page 88 of an American Girl catalog.  

For ye daughterless, American Girl is this unstoppable commercial juggernaut pushing $100 dolls and dressalike clothes for girls and dolls and buyups without end. We’re two dolls and some clothes and accessories in, and down a few hundred, but that’s spread over a couple years. Pater’s okay with it.  

Anyway, here we are at the kitchen table, where GC flips through her AmGirl catalog and stops at the page with a kid in the three-piece Ballerina Outfit For Girls.   

I happen to see and yell, “Oh come on! She’s supposed to be a dancer?”

 “No way!” scoffs Girl Child.

And we’re off, deriding the catalog model’s limp and unconvincing attempt to stand like an actual ballerina. What position is that supposed to be? Where’s the turnout? Look at the stupid thing she does with her arms.

After a couple of years of ballet dadhood, the flagrant wrongness offends.

It’s more outrageous for Girl Child. At age six, she's now in her second year of twice-a-week classes at the Genoa Academy Of Classical Dance. The real Russian deal, man, like kiddy Spetsnaz training with music and pink tights. Pater has seen new girls run bawling to their mamas – talking Russian speakers, not candy-ass kids from the Unsuburb. GC loves it. And she could look more balletic in her sleep, than the kid in the catalog. 

GC gets big grins imagining what Ballet Mistress Oksana would do to such a feeb. And we jump on the photog and whoever let the silly picture get in. How dumb was that?

Time to let it go, but it was great, wasn’t it?

Immediately I flash on guys yelling at TV jocks, then think about how this sort of thing can be more than entertainment. For family, it’s ritual bonding and affirmation of shared knowledge and values and, you know, how great it is to hang out and go nuts over nothing.

Later, something else hits me.

I have been so daughter-ized. A few years back I didn’t know American Girl existed, and I didn’t know chassé from tendu and pas de chat. But now I do. 

Not only do I know, I care about some of this stuff, and I live in a world grown bigger and more colorful 'cause it's girlier. 

What’s next?

So, Daughter Dad, how has female progeny rocked your world? 

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