Not So Macho Man

Do you ever wonder if being married and being the father of daughters has stolen some, most, or all of your masculinity? Being a macho man sometimes might not go over too well with with daughters. Our wives can ignore our macho traits, as our spouses are experts at ignoring most of what we do and say. Unless she wants the gutters cleaned out, the oil changed in the minivan or the grass mowed and the flower beds weeded.

But daughters are often too young and too inexperienced to distinguish between our macho bluster and the real you.

That's why I've been purchasing feminine products for all four women under my roof for the past six years. First of all, I do the grocery shopping and have don so for my entire marriage. The women I bump into in the grocery store want to induct me into sainthood and they implore me to 'please' speak to their husbands about the grocery shopping or doing laundry. My wife would prefer that I knew how to rewire every electrical circuit in the house or be able to build an edition onto the house with my own two hands. Which is why I do the grocery shopping. I actually chose to do the grocery shopping, and there are two important reasons: One, I stick to the budget. If my wife shopped for groceries, we'd end up spending a couple hundred dollars more per trip and have less food to show for it. The second reason is that I enjoy cooking, and I pack my girls' lunches for schools, so I have a vested interest in what's in the grocery cart. But I digress, slightly.

When I was purchasing feminine products for just my wife, I could bury the stuff in the grocery cart under the frozen vegetables and between cans of soup. The girl or lady at the register would barely notice as she was ringing items through the scanner with everything else.

Now, if I'm obligated to purchase feminine products for four different females, you can imagine the looks I get. You just can't hide that much stuff in one shopping cart. Because guess what? If you have multiple females in your house, they ALL want something different. They all use different stuff. You can't get away with buying one jumbo box or package of one thing that works for all of them. No! You have to buy one product for before, one for during, one for nighttime, and one for when it's over but not quite. Then multiply that by four! No way to hide it all in the cart. But since I do the shopping, that's a fate with which I'm stuck.

But the masculinity thing continues to bother me. I mean, a couple of weeks ago, one daughters had an immediate need for a particular feminine product. She was out of this particular item and had an urgent need. Does Mom get the request to go to the store for the emergency? No. Dad fields the request, and this one's bad. Because it's not a regular grocery shopping trip where I can hide the stuff in the shopping cart.

It's one item, in CVS. At least the checkout person was a female. Can't imagine what a moronic teenage boy would have thought or what lame joke he might've attempted to share with me.

So, I still don't know if this make me a renaissance man or a wimp. I don't know if it's good that that I've blurred the boundaries, in my daughters' eyes, of what a father and a mother are responsible for, or if they don't quite get it. One thing's for sure. I may have gotten the future males in their lives into something they never imagined doing. "Honey, can you run down to Rite Aid and get me some 'overnights'?" Poor guys, they'll never see it coming.

Thank goodness I've got the Steelers on Sunday afternoon, cold beer for one hand and a channel changer for the other. And no grocery shopping to do.

Both Feet in Mouth

How do Dads know what is the right thing to say? In all circumstances and situations? It's virtually impossible, no matter how hard we try or how well intentioned we might be.

I still haven't figured out why my daughter hasn't spoken to me in a week. She was dating a boy for about five or six months (it might've been longer but I kept convincing myself it wasn't going to last very long). She came to me one evening, not long after the school year started in tears and sobs. She told me she had broken up with her boyfriend. So as my daughter cried on my shoulder, I silently whooped it up in my brain, as if my beloved Steelers had just won another Super Bowl. The breakup was totally unexpected by all in the family. I later heard rumors that he was cheating on my daughter and bragging about it. When I heard these rumors, I said to myself, "good for my daughter," because too often ladies will hang on to a guy for all the wrong reasons. That's probably a post for another day. Why my daughter was crying when SHE was the one doing the breaking up, is beyond my feeble male brain. Maybe it was the cheating thing. Fortunately I've yet to run into this young man since the separation.

Back to last week. Same daughter came to me to tell me she was dating a new boy. My words were all wrong. I said, "why?" and "you don't need this now. We've got school, basketball season is starting, we're trying to pick a college, etc." She jumped up from the couch and proclaimed, "you wonder why I don't come to you with this stuff." Which was anger talking because of my three daughters, this one probably talks to me the most about important stuff.

What I was thinking didn't match up with the words that came out of my mouth. Which happens more frequently than I'd like to admit.

What I was thinking was, "you're a great kid and I don't want you to think you NEED to have a boyfriend." What I was thinking was, "I saw how hurt you were just a few months ago and I don't like to see you hurt and don't want it to happen again." What I was thinking was, "sometimes you should wait a while before you get into a relationship after getting out of one because sometimes you're vulnerable and you might not be thinking clearly."

Too bad my mouth and my brain weren't in sync. My daughter might still be talking to me.

Now, back to the ex-boyfriend. It's probably a good thing I haven't seen him since my daughter dumped him. He's a scrawny little thing and although I might be past my prime when it comes to my physical conditioning, never put it past an angry father to seriously consider inflicting physical harm on a teenage boy who's wronged his daughter. I know it's illegal, but I'm sure there's some sort of 'angry father insanity defense.' Which is why I closed my last post with the thought that when a teenage boy or young man comes calling on your precious daughter, you should answer the door with a flyswatter, a staple gun and anything that could be perceived to be a weapon.

My one daughter once congratulated me on being "cool" around her boyfriend. Several months later she told me he was afraid of me. That's a good thing.  But since we're not all tall, tough and cool like Trace Adkins, we need some tools at the door.

The flyswatter is to flap those backward-facing baseball hats off of young boys. The only way to describe this 'fashion statement' is moronic. Just plain stupidity. If the kid can't wear his baseball hat the way it was meant to be worn, he doesn't deserve to wear it. Besides, proper manners would dictate that he remove his hat upon approaching your front door anyway.

The staple gun is for the young man's pants. Inevitably he arrives at your front door with his jeans halfway down his butt. The staple gun is to make certain that his pants don't fall off while he's on his date with your daughter.

Now, if you hunt or fish, you already have some items in the house that you can take to answer the door. But if you don't have anything like that, a baseball bat, a flashlight, a pipe wrench, a tire iron all will work. And of course, you can make an excuse for answering the door with any one of those items. Like "I was watching the Phillies, and I always hold Masher while I'm watching the ballgame. Masher is the name of my bat." Or, "I was fixing the sink in the bathroom and I have to get a bigger wrench. By the way, did you know that the nickname for a pipe wrench is a knuckle-buster?"

I'll check with my attorney about the 'crazed, angered father' insanity defense.

P.S. Don't forget to tell your daughter you love her.