Stupid January
I’m sure you all missed Anonymous Husband. I apologize for my long absence. I was in seclusion for nearly three months working on a two-page, single-spaced Holiday letter to accompany our family photo (yes, Anonymous Husband is the kind of person that sends really, really, really long Holiday letters). That and work got crazy. The benefit of work getting busy is that my acts of stupidity decrease drastically.
Recently, I received a call at work from my wonderful wife. The conversation began like this: "Guess what your daughter just did?" We all know, no good will come from a conversation that begins this way. Immediately, my mind began to race. Did my youngest fall down the stairs? Did she just drink all of my Coke Zero? Did she burn her hand on the curling iron? Did she throw something at the flat screen television? My youngest isn’t generally accident prone, but she’s definitely more mischievous than her two older siblings. So what did she do? She gave her older sister’s American Girl doll, named Emily, and her older sister’s Fancy Nancy doll a haircut. (In my daughter’s defense, a doll named Fancy Nancy is just asking for a brutal haircut.)
To my credit (I’m always the first to credit myself), my first thought was about my older daughter and the total devastation she would feel upon returning home from school to see her Emily’s new hair. My second thought was "How much is this going to cost me?” I started asking ridiculous questions about the haircut like "is it noticeable" and "if we cut bangs on the doll would you notice" and then I began performing internet searches for "American girl doll repairs." And before I knew it I was talking about sending Emily to the American Girl "hospital." I kid you not. So Emily will soon be visiting the "hospital" where she will be undergoing a full noggin replacement and the only downside is that she’s not covered by my health insurance plan.
A grown man talking about doll hospitals, cutting bangs on a doll and Googling "replacing heads of American Girl dolls." I didn’t sign up for this, but of course none of this should be a surprise to me. The writing has been on the wall for sometime now and I’ve just chosen to ignore it.
The most obvious sign that I chose to ignore happened when I returned home late from work one night a couple of weeks ago. My wife was out with her parents and siblings who were in town for the Holidays and I was stuck at work. My oldest niece who has just recently entered her teens was watching my two girls along with my two other nieces. When I walked in the door just before 9 p.m. that night there were dolls and blankets scattered from one end of the house to the other. A bedspread was being air-dried in one corner of the family room – an apparent victim of a makeup mishap. Miley Cyrus was being blasted from upstairs and The Parent Trap (with Lindsay Lohan, not Hailey Mills) was on the television. And the giggling. My gosh, the giggling! After a quick surveillance and confirmation that all of the children that were supposed to be in the house, were indeed still in the house, I excused myself to go shovel the snow from the driveway even though there had been no snow that day.
When it got too cold to stall outside any longer, I snuck back into the house. Well, sneak isn’t really accurate as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade could have stormed through the house and the girls wouldn’t have noticed given the volume of the giggling and constant blasting of "Party in the USA." (Yes, it’s pathetic that I know the name of a single Miley Cyrus song.) After again confirming that all the girls were accounted for and uninjured, I secluded myself in my room and turned on something manly on the television like Man vs. Wild or Survivorman. Nothing says "manly" like a guy surviving in the wild eating raw zebra. The girls ran upstairs, then downstairs, played "Party in the USA" about 12 times (not that I was counting) and giggled through everything they did.
Finally, I mustered up the courage at around 11:30 to encourage them to go to bed. I was met with a lot of resistance. After some serious negotiations, my two youngest nieces agreed to climb into their sleeping bags if I agreed to let them use the flashlight to continue looking at books. The negotiations with my oldest daughter (currently 8 years old) and my teenage niece went a little better as they agreed to go to bed without any concessions from me other than asking me to close the door when I left the room.
I crashed hard after they were all down for the night and the next thing I remembered was waking up the next morning and trying to answer my wife’s questions about why the house looks like it was just hit by a tornado. Of course I blamed it on the five girls in the house before I realized that when my wife asked me "What happened downstairs?" she was really asking "Why didn’t you clean up the mess downstairs before going to bed?" I tried explaining the chaos but it fell on deaf ears. As I left for work that morning all five girls were sitting quietly on the couch watching iCarly or Wizards of Waverly Place (I know WAY too much about this stuff). And I was grateful to be going into work.
After finishing my doll hospital discussion with my wife, I hung up the phone and stared out my window. I began to see my future as the father of two girls and only one boy. And my brain said to me: "Doll hospitals are only the beginning, my friend." And for once, my brain may be right.
My eight-year old daughter worships her teenage cousin. Which isn’t a bad thing because her cousin is terrific and a model child. Over Christmas I was talking to my sister-in-law about her teenage daughter and about the drama that comes with the territory. Clothes, cellphones, texting boyfriends and makeup are suddenly HUGE issues. I’m not naïve enough to think that my daughters wouldn’t ever reach that stage, but I mistakenly thought I had at least 15 or 16 years before I had to worry about stuff like that. I’m suddenly doing the math in my head: "If Sweet Pea is like her cousin then in less than 5 years she’s going to be texting and wearing makeup. In less than 8 years she will be driving." Then I started thinking about my youngest and the possibility of having two teenage girls in the house at one time. At that point my head just about exploded.
This realization isn’t unique to me. Every father goes through this at some point. And only two teenage girls should be easy compared to a lot of folks like my dad and my father-in-law who both had to deal with three teenage girls. Right? Right! Please tell me I’m right!
Given my relationship with The Boy (as previously documented in this space), I always thought he would be the toughest. But after the last couple of weeks I have seriously reconsidered. The Boy is simple and easy to please. Let him watch a basketball or football game or give him a pack of football, basketball or baseball cards and he’s happy for hours. I don’t recall ever getting a call from my wife after one of his action figures lost an appendage. As SoCal Brother (holding steady at number 6 on the family power rankings) pointed out in an email after Emily’s unauthorized haircut, "It’s a good thing they don’t have either a Power Ranger or Transformers hospital" or, as the father of two boys, he’d be making weekly trips. Until this week I didn’t appreciate how great it is to have a son who can pepper me with a hundred sports-related questions in under a minute. He and I are going to be just fine.
But I don’t know what I’m going to do with the girls. I don’t think I can handle even one more conversation about a doll hospital, let alone the hundreds of conversations about clothes, cellphones, makeup and boyfriends that are in store for me.
I may be shoveling lots of imaginary snow over the next five to 17 years – not that I’m counting.
Author: Anonymous Husband
