You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!
Teenage girls!
The way they talk. The way they walk. The way they roll their eyes with utter contempt. The make up, the slinky shirts, the tight jeans.
What the hell is going on?
Where’d my little girl go? Where’s the baby doll in the tutu and cute hat. Where’s the baby who sucked her thumb and and cuddled with a stuffed teddy bear?
Where’s the little girl who use to call me daddy?
She gone, consumed by hormones stirred by a chronological time bomb that changes every daddy’s little girl into a teenage mutant.
My daughter just turned 15 going on 25. In the time it took for her to blow out her candles, she became another person.
Cute became defiant. Adorable became indolence. Playful became sarcastic. She use to jump in my lap, or hang on my arm. Now she barely acknowledges my existence unless she needs money.
“Dad I’m going to the mall, can I have some money?”
I usually say yes, just grateful to talk to her on any level.
Where is the little girl that enjoyed Dora the Explorer?
Now it’s project run-way and MTV’s Jersey Shore where every other word is Bitch and Douche Bag.
Where the hell is the F.C.C. when you need them? What’s a parent to do?
It was during some horrifying episode of teenage television that an image of Christie Brinkley in her prime flashed across the screen.
I’m old but I “ain’t” dead. I made the mistake of saying aloud, “Now there’s a beautiful woman.”
My 15-year-old turned on me like a vampire sniffing blood.
“Really dad? Really?”
Her eyes were angry and fixed on me as if I was a bug she wanted to squash.
“What?,” I said chuckling. “I can’t comment on a woman’s beauty?”
With all the subtlety of a black widow spider injecting poison into its prey she says; “that’s creepy dad. You are a creeper.”
And there it was. In the time it takes for the Situation to flash his six pack to a crowd of Jersey Skanks, I had gone from Daddy to Creeper.
When did I become as ridiculous as a monkey launching his own excrement from his cage?
You want to know when teenagers think you’re irrelevant? When they talk around you like you arent’t there or you have a hearing problem.
The other day, I was driving my daughter and her friends to the movies. She was in the front seat. Her two friends directly behind us. The music was on at a tolerable level on what I thought was a cool rock station. I’m sure they think Pearl Jam is for Geezers. Anyway. To these worldly girls of 15 years, I’m somebody’s grandpa with one foot in the grave and a megaphone in one ear.
The girls start talking about each other’s parents, and what they do on dates, and what girl at school is a sleazy skank.
WHAT!
Do they not realize the back seat is only 3 feet away? Do you not realize I can hear every single stupid thing coming out of your teenage pie holes girls? Have youth of today lost their Mother “F-in” minds!
You need more Crazy? Let me direct you to the crazy teen trying to sneak out of my house looking like a FLOOZIE.
The other morning she came down for school wearing an outfit that would make a Vietnamese working girl blush.
“What the hell is that?”
“HUH?”
“Go upstairs and change”
“But everyone is wearing this.”
“I don’t care what other kids are wearing. You aren’t wearing that to school!”
She rolled her eyes and stomped her foot and put on that sad sack pouty face.
“Did you hear me,” I reiterate. “You put on a shirt that shows no cleavage. You wipe off that make up from the Salvador Dali collection!”
I don’t know where my little girl went to, but I sure miss her.
15 year old girls are ridiculous. The problem is they just don’t know it.
In the immortal words of my dad: “Wait till she has kids of her own.”
I can’t wait. That’ll teach her.
And that is crazy.