Newly Edited for 21​^st​Century Technological Phenomena

Room Décor, Chronology of

The daughter’s bedroom will undergo a series of very definite changes indicating the passage of time and the gradual estrangement of the daughter’s identity from your own. She collects horse figurines—expensive, painted things with spindly legs that always snap—and the interest makes Christmases and birthdays easy. You spend a week in the garage building the shelves where the creatures can live, and years later, after the horses have all gathered dust, you find her wrapping their super-glued, taped-up limbs in old t-shirts and storing them away for good.

Her room is painted over too many times to remember, favorite color under favorite color until she can find a permanent answer to the question, and you’re sure she never will. She insists on doing the work herself, and there are fingerprints and paint drips and thin spots in the corners where old favorites show through—chartreuse underneath sea foam underneath jungle green—but you both know it’s too transient to matter.

Familial Communication, Electronic

It will start with the daughter pleading for a cell phone, and you will refuse, fundamentally convinced that age and responsibility should precede it. However, afterschool activities and potential emergencies weigh on the mind, and you buy her a cell phone with pre-programmed top-40 songs and no real buttons. Afterward, she seems to communicate

mainly through text messages and spends dinner times and car rides texting smiles and frowns at appropriate points.

You buy your own cell phone and tell her that it’s for convenience, and you record her

playing at a winter recital and use the muffled notes of the ​Moonlight Sonata​to signal her calls. Texts are sent asking about her day, you hoping the new medium will prompt more conversation on her part. She responds hours later with single words and brief fragments, and you learn very quickly that this is an unrealistic hope to have.

Dating

The daughter will start painting her nails not because she likes the color, but because the polish tastes bitter and the flakes of glittering blue and pink stick to her teeth like bruises, discouraging her from biting her nails down to the nub. You find out she’s kicking this habit for a boy, and when he arrives at your door to take her away you can’t decide if you’re worrying too much or too little. When she steps out of his car and onto the lawn, smiling and waving and ten minutes late, a heart attack sometime in the near future seems unavoidable.

The boy plays hockey, and your memory associates him less with the daughter and more with cups of neon-tinted sports drink crushed underfoot—with color seeping into ice. The daughter loves him more than she should, nothing about him in particular garnering this emotion, but simply her need to be in love with something. Trying to say comforting words through the bathroom door, her crying on the other side, you hope the next time she falls for someone that it’s something impossible, that she’ll have all the love with none of the consequences.

Food, Preparation and Appreciation

The daughter will prepare family meals on rare obligatory occasions, days usually centered on you in some way—Father’s Day, your birthday. She wakes you up just after the sun and brings you a bowl of breakfast cereal and a piece of undercooked toast, and when she’s older you run into the kitchen in the morning and find her standing half-panicked at the stove, fanning away smoke, or balancing shakily on a stool trying to switch off the fire alarm with the tips of her fingers.

Eventually, you walk into the kitchen sleepy-eyed and paying no mind to the smell of burning things, and she presents you with buttered toast and scrambled eggs and coffee with the milk already stirred in. Leaning against the counter, eating the colorful sugary cereal that she’s embarrassed to buy, the daughter looks so proud of the successful breakfast that when you go to throw your paper plate away, you pretend not to notice the remnants of

not-quite-meals resting burnt and inedible at the top of the garbage bin. (​see also;​Gifts, Homemade)

Nest, Empty

You will never give the daughter permission to shave her legs or wear mascara, but you’ll find yourself with a bathroom cupboard stocked with lavender scented shaving cream and cheap bottles of makeup remover, and you will ask no questions. One day you go to her room and sit on the edge of her bed and watch the past and future colliding—pictures of far off colleges tacked up next to post cards from zoos and pictures torn from horse-themed calendars.

There is a bottle of stolen raspberry vodka hidden underneath a loose floorboard that curls up in the corner like a half smile. You briefly consider confiscating it, but don’t want to disturb anything. When she goes off to college on the West Coast, you return to her room and find her memory packed away and taped over, all except for the vodka forgotten underfoot. Taking the first drink of alcohol you’ve had in years, you want to ask her not to leave, not just

yet, but she’s long gone. She cannot hear you. (​see also​;The Desire to Go Somewhere Far, Far Away)

For further reading:

The Hopeless Father’s Guide to Average Daughters

College and Marriage

– Briana Cox