Girl Talk

Newsletter 2023-07-31

I’m raising four girls. That might not be news to you, but somehow, it is to me. Before a certain age, kids are more or less androgynous. Through most of elementary school, you can raise boys and girls the same without any deleterious effects on either group. The operative adjective at that age isn’t male or female, but feral. The average kindergarten teacher needs fewer courses in human psychology and more training in handling wild animals. For Christmas, our go-to gift for teachers is those impenetrable leather gloves used by falconers. Things start to change once the kids hit middle school. Suddenly, my wife is pulling our daughters aside for one-on-one talks and our washing machine is full of extra undergarments. Granted, parenting is just the process of gradually being buried alive by dirty laundry, but the trend recently accelerated abruptly. My own role as a girl dad is being sidelined as my wife’s role as a girl mom ramps up. After years of leading a tribe of gender neutral offspring, I now find myself dramatically outnumbered in a house full of little women. I don’t think they’re a threat to my safety, but I can’t be sure. I wrote forty thousand words on surviving the zombie apocalypse but zero on surviving my kids going through puberty.

There’s no reason I have to play second fiddle to my wife throughout this process—or play a fiddle at all. Truthfully, I shouldn’t be trusted near any instrument. I quit playing the saxophone after just a few months and my fourth grade music teacher still ended up in therapy. Lola and I never sat down and discussed who would give the kids important life talks on what. We both just sort of stepped up in situations that played to our strengths. I handle getting the kids involved in extracurricular activities and, more importantly, getting them to quit. We have zero soccer games a week instead of three all thanks to me. Lola, on the other hand, handles information sessions on all age-based biological processes. It makes sense. She’s a woman of science, and also a woman. She’s been through this before. If I gave these talks, I’d be reading from the same Wikipedia pages that the kids could have just as easily looked up themselves. I’d probably get distracted by other links and end up giving my kids a lecture about the landings at Normandy. It doesn’t matter where you start out on the internet. All roads lead to World War II.

That’s not to say I’m entirely removed from the process. While at Walmart with my daughters last week, I bought maxi pads for the first time. That threw my kids for a loop. My thirteen-year-old, Betsy, asked what type Mom wanted. While I would totally buy menstrual products for a loved one if asked, these were actually for me. It was just one of the many exciting new experiences I’ve had while recovering from my lingering butt wound. That aisle isn’t just for ladies. Tampons, for example, are excellent for treating bullet wounds. If only they’d had those on Omaha Beach.

Women’s fashion is another area where I’m out of my depth. I have no idea how teenage girls are supposed to dress. Lola recently took Betsy shopping and came home with brand new jeans with holes in the knees. I didn’t say anything, but it killed me inside. I spent my kids’ entire lives telling them to stop wearing holes in things only for stores to start selling purposely damaged outfits. I don’t understand how that’s edgy or cool. It would be like if Toyota started selling its cars pre-crashed. Damaged goods should come with a reduced price, not a high fashion mark-up. Unfortunately, Lola said all women’s jeans in that store came with holes in them. The first innovative fashion designer to sell fully intact clothing will die a billionaire.

We run into similar challenges with school shorts. The handbook requires the shorts to be fingertip length, but that’s a challenge when you have short kids with long orangutan arms. Most pairs of shorts straight off the rack don’t make the cut. To find something that’s school appropriate, we have to consult the Amish. I never ran into that issue growing up. My school had uniforms, and long shorts for guys were all the rage. The typical pair would hit me mid-shin. Showing off my sultry knees would have been too distracting for all the women in the building. I wouldn’t mind if our school had uniforms now. That would likely mean we’d have an official website where we could pick out identical copies of whatever we wanted with minimal effort involved. Whatever we bought would be overpriced and dorky, but it wouldn’t have any holes in it. My kids would have to damage their clothing the old fashioned way: by wearing it once for half an hour.

Given my stylistic limitations, Lola and I have divided up the shopping. I handle groceries, and she handles clothes. One exception is athletic wear. If Betsy needs ten pairs of identical black running shorts, I’m her guy. I’m a good point of contact for all quantity over quality situations. I do all of my clothes shopping online, as God intended. Lola better live forever because I absolutely cannot handle taking the kids to the store and waiting for them to browse through racks and try on things. I recently discovered a brand of t-shirt that fits me well and is thin enough that I don’t sweat. I’ll be ordering it online in various colors until the end of my days. If you ever see me in anything else, you’ll know I’ve been replaced by a body snatcher. Even that is a huge diversity of outfits compared to some people I know. In college, I was roommates for two years with a guy who wore a gray t-shirt and jean shorts everyday, regardless of the weather. He had multiple copies of both in his closet. I looked down on him for it at the time, but now I’m exactly the same person as him, but with a few extra colors. Also, I own pants. I don’t have enough leg hair to pull off shorts in January.

As my daughters get older, my newest issue is not with girls, but with boys. Betsy suddenly has a bunch of male classmates who want to hang out with her. She’s been on two dates already, which is two more than I went on before high school. My parents never had to give me a talk about dating. My natural unattractiveness and lack of social skills kept me from getting into any trouble, despite my best efforts. Being a loser is the ultimate birth control. I trust Betsy to make good choices. It helps that, as small as she is, she could still beat up both of the guys she’s been out with. Also, “dating” at this age is just going to a dance with bounce houses sponsored by a church or sitting next to each other in a movie theater. The biggest lesson I’ve learned so far is that, when I give her money to go out, I won’t be getting any change. It’s possible she isn’t going on any dates at all and is just pocketing the cash. She found the ultimate hustle to pay for college.

Other girls can be a problem, too. I have a hard time keeping up with who is a best friend for life and who is a persona non grata. It’s possible this issue has nothing to do with the fact that I have daughters and more to do with the fact that they have lots of friends. I didn’t have much drama in my life at that age because I was pretty isolated to begin with. Being a hermit preempts a lot of problems. The social situations my daughters find themselves in are extremely dynamic, and I’ve abandoned all efforts to keep up. If someone shows up at our house to play, I assume they’re in our good graces, and if they’re not here, I assume they’re dead to us. There’s no inbetween. Consequently, I feel extremely validated in my inability to keep track of any of their friends’ names. I can’t even keep my own kids straight half the time. There’s no way I’m ever going to remember a rotating cast of forty extra characters. When a random kid rings the doorbell, I simply shout that someone’s here, and all four of my children come running. The system hasn’t failed me yet.

I’m laid back when it comes to my girls and their social circles, but I also have a hidden protective streak. Friday, my eleven-year-old, Mae, was supposed to meet her friends at the movie theater to see Barbie. We dropped her off fifteen minutes before the start of the movie. At showtime, Mae called us in tears. None of her friends showed up. After we picked her up, I pressed her for details. She thought I was rubbing her embarrassment in her face. In reality, I was trying to calibrate my counter strike against our newfound family enemies. She failed to realize how close I was to ruining some lives that day. After further investigation, I determined this wasn’t a deliberate slight. Her friends are just irresponsible and committed to a plan they didn’t actually have permission to carry out. Their parents never said they could go to the movie in the first place, whereas we just shrugged and dropped off our daughter, no questions asked. I used to go to the movies without an adult all the time at her age and I never got murdered, so there’s definitely some survivorship bias at play. Either way, I took the entire family to see Barbie the next day. My favorite crises are the ones that can be solved with six matinee tickets and a giant tub of popcorn.

It’s possible all of these challenges would be exactly the same if I had four sons instead of four daughters. I don’t plan to raise a control group of four boys to find out. I only have my own life as a point of comparison. At their age, I didn’t have to worry about dating or fashion or wearing different undergarments at puberty, but I did encounter a friends-into-enemies situation. One of my best friends growing up would randomly turn against me for months at a time. When he was up, he was one of the most fun people in the world, but when he was down, his head was full of imaginary adversaries and perceived slights. Today, he probably would have been diagnosed with something, but back then, it was just considered a personality quirk. The year after high school, he was in one of his down phases, and we parted ways with him forever viewing me as the bad guy. He didn’t resurface until years later when I went viral as a dad on Twitter. He tagged my handle in a thread blasting “the real me” as being a terrible person. To his credit, I am an objectively awful human being, but not for any of the reasons he mentioned. Among the many faults he cited were that my mom is cheap and that I’m obsessed with World War II. For the record, I will forever be grateful to my mom for passing down her money-saving habits to me, and I make no apologies for reading about military history. I didn’t realize that having a hobby disqualified me from being a writer. Rather than being insulted, I was flattered. I was important enough to have a hater. I had finally made it. Changing friendships aren’t a girls-only issue, but I’ll help my daughters navigate those situations and all the other pressures they’re facing as best I can. I don’t have some magical panacea to solve all their problems or make everyone like them, but I can always buy more movie tickets. Maybe we’ll see Oppenheimer next. The world could use more mad scientists.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James