You Know What’s Crazy? I’ll Tell You What’s Crazy!
Finding out through FACEBOOK that your teenage daughter has a boyfriend.
YEP.
When my little girl was born, the day she clawed her way out of the womb, I swore that I would punish any man who with the temerity to date her.
“Hello Sheriff’s Department. I’d like to reserve a cell with a posture pedic bunk.”
She’s 15 now, but for some reason I still see the little girl who wore baby doll dresses and big hats and colored with markers on the kitchen table. I am the only one who still sees her this way.
This is the Crazy daughter who drove through my refrigerator. This is the crazy daughter who is too smart for her own good, all ready on the Duke University radar screen since she was a Middle Schooler. When it comes to intelligence and book skills, she is cunning like a fox. Real Life Common Sense? Leaves blowing across my yard have more life skills than my lovely daughter.
So I’m talking to my sister in Santa Cruz about her kids and our dad and the weather. Then she ends the conversation with: “I need to ask you about Kenzie’s status change?”
Status Change?
Has she moved into a new tax bracket I am unaware of? Did she descend from Russian Royalty and they are here to give us Rubels? Is she emulating Chastity Bono and having an operation that pysiologically helps her grow facial hair?
“Status Change? What are you talking about?”
“I was on FACEBOOK,” my sister says with a giggle.
FACEBOOK IS THE DEVIL YOU KNOW.
“And I see she has changed her personal status to: IN A RELATIONSHIP.”
“In a relationship,” I say like a parrot in the pet store.
I feel a wave of question marks fall on my head like a rock slide of stupid. I should be in the Batman Movie wearing a big green leotard covered with flourescent question marks.
“Well there is this guy she has been jogging with after school. And they go to movies…BUT, when we ask her about it, she says they are just friends,” I say half way stumbling through an answer.
And that is true. Or that was true. When asked about the new guy, she would wave her hand at us in an insouciant way, like the Queen addressing peasants and say “Go away paupers. Take your tiny thoughts and silly lives and vacate my greatness with your accusatory gobbledygook”
My visions of the Queen are vanquished as my sister, a pure FACEBOOK addict, who burps and updates her profile, says to me; “Well he has changed his relationship status as well.”
I had that feeling you get when you are lying on your back and the anasthesiologist says count back from 100 and all your mind can see is a hazy image of Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson in a boat.
“OK thanks for the status update Sis. The burgers are done sizzling. I’ll call you this weekend.”
I carry the burgers inside and stare at my little girl. Her hair is past her shoulders, curly and blonde. Her eyes are a blue that is only produced in Antarctica when the sun hits the atmosphere just right. Her face is between the baby I loved and the woman she is becoming.
“Hey, I just talked to your aunt,” I say glopping ketchup on my burger.
“What’s this I hear about a FACEBOOK status change?”
You would have thought I had taken the crystal champagne glasses we use for hamburger night and thrown them into the fire place that is always burning, like my home is a set in a Mexican Soap Opera.
The wife looks at the daughter. The daughter looks at her burger and then the youngest son. The youngest son smiles and shrugs. It’s obvious he knows everything and he has been ordered to clam up.
Even the two cats, who are watching bees buzz outside the window, stop and look into each other’s cat eyes.
I have played daddy poker enough to know that I am the last to know. Everybody else has gone “All In” and I’m the last one to bet holding a pair of lousy twos.
“Yeah about that,” my daughter says letting her golden locks fall in front of her face to avoid direct eye contact.
“I was trying to figure out how to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“She’s officially dating now,” the wife chimes in.
As the cats, the bees, the children and the wife look at my face for signs of what is to come next;
random images of my little girl flash before my eyes.
I suddenly see her as a 20 month old mighty might, muscular and strong, standing on my shoulders and doing a flip into the apartment complex swimming pool. I remember other dads growing uncomfortable. “She can swim dumb ass, sit down!”
I see myself running beside her for the equivalent of 2 miles making sure that she didn’t fall while learning to ride her new Christmas bike.
I see myself picking her up every day after work, her hair dripping wet, reaking of chlorine, and driving her home.
I look up from my thoughts. “When was I going to find out?”
“I was afraid to tell you because you have always said that when I started dating you were going to kill the boy.”
I smirk. I do say that, you know.
“Well, I’d like to talk to him.”
“No,” she hollers picking her plate up from the table. “I don’t want you talking to him.”
I think about my little girl dating. The thought is as comforting as a catheter. I think about her coming home late, parked in the darkened driveway and not immediately coming inside as the windows steam up. I feel stomach bile fill my esophagus. Is it a heart attack or just indigestion. I push it back down and will deal with whatever it is later.
I suddenly wonder to myself if bird shot mames? I wonder if you really can punch a person with a telephone book in the neck and not leave a mark. I wonder if it’s too soon to ask ATT for a tracking device for my daughter’s phone.
I look at my cats who are grinning at me like some sad ass world of Alice in Wonderland. Even the freaking cats knew she was dating before me. The cats, who crap in the sand and push that sand over their own feline excrement knew my little girl was dating and it was on FACEBOOK before I knew.
How dumb am I? So dumb the cats are crapping secrets in their litter box for me to sift through later.
What else don’t I know around here.
Are the cats writing checks for cat nip I can’t afford? Is the wife secretly laying on the couch all day sipping sweet tea and watching episodes of Law and Order from 1989? Is the little boy signing up for ballet and nobody thinks I can handle that truth? Am I going to wake up from a day dream in the shower and find out that I wasn’t really shot? It was all just a bad dream? My name is really J.R.?
My blue eyed daughter prances out of the room, as only a person with a changed relationship status can prance.
My wife silently laughs as she eats a bit of burger.
Suddenly, I feel like changing my FACEBOOK status.
Moved to Vegas. Talking to a show girl with daddy issues. Gambling mortgage money on hard eights.
I check the mental box for this option but find none. I laugh a secret laugh to myself as I eat a bite of my own burger, one of the best I have ever cooked.
And that is crazy.