Spring isn’t just Prom Season, it’s also Daddy-Daughter Dance Season, at once a reminder how fast the years go and how few are left for a daddy to perfect the art of scaring off would-be gentleman callers, which wouldn’t be necessary if all gentleman callers were truly gentleman, but that’s a topic for another column.
Time melted before my eyes last week thanks to that handy Facebook feature that reminds us what we posted on this date in years past. Recent days have resurfaced statuses from our daughter’s First Holy Communion one year ago, as well as photos from previous Daddy-Daughter Dances. That’s the second time I’ve called it a “Daddy-Daughter Dance” because that time will come soon enough when I will no longer be known as “Daddy,” so the more mature “Father-Daughter Dance” can wait.
Last Friday brought our fourth such annual event, whatever you call it. She’s in third grade now, so we only have two left before she’s off to middle school and the dances there that I won’t be invited to. You remember middle school dances, the ones with the boys lined up talking on one side of the gym and the girls on the other, not unlike what happens at a Daddy-Daughter Dance shortly after arrival when the girls scurry off to be with their friends and dads huddle on the side talking Hawks or Cubs or home-brewing or something of the like.
That’s how dinner goes too, before the dance. Dads on one side of the table, girls on the other. Every year that dinner is an exercise in who would like to go with us to the same restaurant we’ve been to before the Daddy-Daughter Dance every year for the last four years. Because of the lack of imagination or tradition, that’s where we go, because that’s where my daughter wants to go.
So I left work a little early to make sure I was home in time to get cleaned up and changed and to have those pictures taken that will live on in Facebook feeds for years to come. Cue my annual panic upon realizing that I hadn’t gotten my daughter a corsage, only to have my wife assure me that it was fine, the other dads in our group hadn’t gotten them for their daughters either. Sure enough, most daughters at the dance wouldn’t have them, and those who did had given them to their dads to hold as the girls danced.
On the way to dinner, I’d noticed someone else’s daughter in a car with one of those gentleman callers, her in a fancy dress, and he in a tux. I imagine they were headed to the Waubonsie Valley High School prom, which was being held that night in Oakbrook Terrace, but I didn’t stop to ask for sure because we were driving in separate vehicles and that would be creepy.
In that moment I thought, that will be my daughter someday soon, off to her prom with some guy who is right now playing Little League or attending Cub Scouts or writing his doctoral thesis, scholarly gentleman that he no doubt is. Will he be considerate enough to take my daughter to dinner at the place she wants to go? Will he remember to bring her flowers? Will he ensure that she’s returned home safe and on time? Will he be able to outrun me if she isn’t?
You have to laugh when you’re reminded how much parenthood changes us. I’m quite sure I wasn’t the young man that I will one day want my daughter’s gentleman callers to be, but that doesn’t stop us from expecting the best of those budding nuclear physicists and molecular engineers. And we should raise our sons to be the same respectful young men when they’re the gentleman callers to other people’s daughters too.
A funny thing happened at this year’s dance, themed as a luau. My daughter, who normally runs off every year to kibitz with her classmates, stuck unusually close. She pulled me out onto the floor for a group lesson in Hawaiian dance and urged me to stick beside her for the hula hoop contest. I was no longer just a necessary prop for the obligatory slow dances like in years past, though I treasured those too, of course.
I always joke when carrying any of my children that the moment at hand may be the last time I ever carry them. Not because I’m growing allergic or planning on checking out any time soon. It’s my little reminder to them – and to me – that they’re growing up fast. Today’s Daddy-Daughter Dance at the grade school becomes tomorrow’s Father-Daughter Dance at her wedding.
So much in our house being about sports, my daughter knows she was born on the 20th anniversary of the Bears’ only Super Bowl win, a fact she playfully repeats to me on occasion, though she also knows that’s not why that date means so much to me now. And she gave me the business the morning after the dance when – for yet another Saturday – she tagged along to her brothers’ baseball games, a good soldier about it all the way.
With all due respect to the little lady born across the pond last weekend, the 9-year-old at our house is the most important princess in our world.
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Twitter: @RobManker
Rob Manker is a freelance writer who lives, works and parents in Naperville.