<< Back 9/11/02 This is not what I signed up for ... By Scott McLeod Fatherhood has been on my mind lately. I think the football game last Friday night is where I realized why. At first, pre-game, I thought that maybe it was the rush of deliveries. Seems some sort of baby boom is exploding all around me, the new additions turning grown men into blabbering, cooing comedy show characters with faces twisted into the appropriate contortions to bring forth a small smile or a giggle. I watch them and remember how not too long ago that was me. It’s almost pathetic how much of the cool, macho bravado simply disappears if you’re committed to being a good dad. Then I thought that perhaps it was the realization that my youngest child is beyond the infant and toddler stage to the wide open era of little boyhood. He is a truckload — no, a boxcar load — of jumping, swinging, throwing, running, yelling, hitting and climbing. We mistakenly took him to see Spiderman the other night, and on the way to the car afterward he took a running start and pounced on Lori’s leg, hanging on with white-knuckled abandon and trying to climb up her thigh like you know who. Once home, our glass door became the target, but only after a good head of steam was built up coming down the hallway. Thankfully the door and Lori’s leg withstood the assault. Next time we might use a little more parental discretion about which movies we see. I’m already having visions of footprints on the walls, perhaps even holes in the sheetrock. I think back many years ago to my brother’s proclamation at about age 7 that he would grow up to be a “wall-climbing man,” and wonder how our hall endured his practice sessions, and how my parents kept from breaking his little legs. In truth, though, all these ruminations about being a parent are more tied to my daughters and all those restless teenage boys I will come to know in the near future. My oldest girl is 10, the other 6. My feelings for them defy words. At this stage our relationship is simple, unfathomably warm and close, and watching them as they grow and react to new experiences recharges my spirit a dozen times a day. It’s a beautiful thing to be a part of a child’s life. Their growth, though, is exactly what begets my confusion. There is a saying among experienced parents that I have ignored for years. Now, though, I realize maybe I haven’t been ignoring it, that it has actually been percolating somewhere down in my stomach, down where ulcers grow. It goes something like this: “Boys are difficult when they are young, but girls are much more difficult when they become teenagers.” I’ve still got some time. But I see the train coming down the track. We went to the high school football game the other night with a few of my wife’s Mexican students. They wanted a slice a American culture, and the annual Tuscola-Pisgah cross-county rivalry is about as small-town America as it gets. I’ve heard estimates that as many as 10,000 were crammed into the Bears’ stadium. As I elbowed my way through the masses looking for a seat, I spied several of the teen-age ladies whom my children know, those girls just a few years older than my own 10-year-old. Some of them were holding hands with boys, arms encircled, midriffs bare. Others were packed up with other girls, talking and looking around, completely consumed by their friends. The parents, of course, were nowhere in sight. These were teen-agers, people who wouldn’t be caught dead with mom or dad at such an event. These kids from the swim team, from the soccer fields on Saturday morning, from a few grades higher up in school now seemed so big. When I fell in love with Lori and we started on this journey together, this was not what I signed up for. It was about her and me. She loves to recount a story from our “marriage encounter” weekend. I don’t know how many people went on one of those while engaged, but we were required to in order to be married in her church. It was for the entire weekend at a camp where men were housed in one dorm and women in another. We would get together as a group, discuss some aspect of married life, then go our separate ways and write about what we envisioned. Then each couple would get together and discuss what they had written. The whole exercise was aimed at putting the issues on the table and learning early on what needed to be reconciled. When kids came up, I wrote a very spirited defense of having perhaps one, of not overpopulating the earth and using up scarce resources; Lori said she wanted seven or 10 or something like that, some number completely off the scale yet right in line with her Catholic upbringing. We definitely had issues. As it turned out, we didn’t. A few months after we were married, Lori became pregnant. We became pregnant. I loved every minute of it, loved her roundness and the life inside. As soon as our first child arrived, there I was: cooing, cuddling, doting and kissing like any new dad. I am proud to say I never once changed a child’s diaper until my own kids came along. Then, suddenly, it just wasn’t a big deal. Fathering was a natural next step in our relationship, and it has been all I imagined. But this fathering of teenage daughters will not, I believe, come natural. No one has explained to me yet how to reconcile the youth I was — reckless, wild, determined to experience everything while completely and happily conscious of the fact that I was breaking all the rules — with the youth I want my children to be. All those things my parents warned me to stay away from were exactly what I had to wallow in. My children look a little like me, so I know they have some of my genes, a bit of me in them. I suspect they will inherit some of the same tendencies. I know, damn it, that a lot of those teen-age boys will be like I was. And that, really, is what worries me. So I’m preparing myself for this ride by doing all the things the psychologists, the studies and the books recommend: we talk, we spend quality time together, we eat meals together, they play sports and take part in cultural activities. We’re trying to mold well-rounded girls. But I know the truth — they aren’t ours. At some point when the hormones kick in, they will prove to me that they are their own people and that they will do as they choose. That’s when my wife better know exactly what to do. (Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)