My daughter’s birthday is today. My first born, she hits the big 3-0. To herald the arrival of this milestone, my ex-whatever wrote me to ask how it feels to be an old man. I thought it was supposed to be Becca’s milestone, not my own.
Still, it was hard to believe all this time had flown by in my life. While it doesn’t seem just like yesterday that she was born, it does seem like it was just yesterday that she moved in with my ex-whatever and I in Port Orchard.
This was actually 16 years ago. I had already been a weekend daddy for some 11 years. My daughter had begun summering with me when she was 14. I guess Port Orchard is far enough from Seattle to feel like a place a teenage girl should take a summer vacation.
About mid-summer that year, Becca began to think about living at our house permanently. I told her that was fine with me, but she would have to be the one to summon up the courage to tell her mother that. It turned out that her mother was very supportive, so suddenly I went from weekend dad to a full-time father.
After getting her enrolled in school, we had “the talk.” No not that “talk.” We would have that one a couple years later. This initial talk was about the rules of the house. Sharon and I had different approaches to child rearing that Becca’s mom. So we had to go over the new ground rules.
Our philosophy was a simple one, really. We start with a blank check of trust. It you give us reason not to trust you, things are taken away. We expected her to go to school every day for the entire day, get good grades, be respectful, and accept our discipline and guidance. She didn’t have to agree with everything and if she didn’t she certainly had the freedom to test her boundaries. But their would be costs.
It didn’t take long for her to discover this. Within about a month after starting school, she had racked up a few too many tardies. In Seattle, this was no big deal. But at South Kitsap High School, a zero tolerance policy was in place. I only found out about the issue because we worked at home. When Becca was with her mother, she would get home first and erase any messages from the school.
No such luck here. We worked at home. When the call came in we naturally answered the phone. The teacher said Becca had had three unexcused tardies. That meant suspension. Now my ex, Sharon, has never been one to back down from an issue when someone is wrong. She immediately asked why we hadn’t been notified after the second one, per their own guidelines. They tried to say they did, but as I said, we worked at home and they never called. There would be no unjust suspension on Sharon’s watch.
However, it was a great time for Becca to learn about the consequences of living in our home. When she came home from school that day, we let her hang herself a bit, giving her plenty of rope. When she finally confessed about the tardies, we explained what the punishment would be.
You think draw and quartering is a horrible torture? How about telling a teenage girl that she would be spending her three-day suspension on the garage floor, cleaning it with the smallest toothbrush we could find.
That was just for starters. Part of the school’s punishment was that she would have to go up to the school and run laps. This gave me an opportunity to add another level of embarrassment and terror.
I reminded Becca that her stepmother and I happened to run a marketing and public relations company. As such, we had ordered shirts that very day that said, “My Daughter Can’t Get To Class On Time. What a Loser!” and had called the local newspaper to let them know that we would be running laps right alongside her, wearing these shirts.
I wish you could have seen the look on her face. Shear terror! She started to plead with us not to do that, that it would ruin what little reputation she had built at the school and that she would be an outcast for the rest of her life.
Mission accomplished, Sharon let her off the hook and explained that there had been a technicality. She wouldn’t have to do any laps and she wasn’t suspended. This time.
With a huge sigh of relief, Becca left the office that was next to her room. She was never tardy again.
In fact, she went on to be part of the school’s flag team, wrote a winning essay to meet Miss America (without her dad’s help), ran for queen in a beauty pageant and even tried out for the school musical — things I never thought she would try to do.
She then went on to college, graduated with a BA in Speech Communications, served as the school’s recruiter for a few years and married her college sweetheart five years ago. She has turned out very well, personally and professionally.
I’d like to think it was those four years she spent with us that helped shape her into the wonderful woman she is today. I don’t think her mother knew what to do with her and she could have easily went the wrong way if she had stayed in Seattle and continued to hang out with her less than desirable friends there.
I used to say that I only wished she had arrived with an owner’s manual. But I don’t think I really needed one. The one we created on the fly was enough. And I’m not sure who grew up more during that time, she or I. I wouldn’t have traded this time with my daughter for anything. It was indeed some of the best years of my life.
Happy birthday, darling daughter. I love you,
Out on the Treasure Coast, looking through photos of my baby,
– Robb