yobech505

Gotta love a daughter who has the canny ability to screen, and assumes the role her father had when she was younger.  Who I date has to pass muster.  And in her gentle way, she can be a heavier hand than I ever had any desire to be.

If you don’t cut it, you ain’t going out with my Dad.  Exclamation point taken!

I don’t know what criteria she uses to determine who is my latest social dating intent.  But if you were to ask me, as an honest inquiry, she’s pretty much poking her finger right on the dot.  She knows her dad.  Sometimes, she emphasizes a blessing. She might be polite in her critique, otherwise, it’s a flat out ‘No!’  The flaw in it all is getting me to listen to her, then follow up on what she is planting, often repetitively, in my sometimes silly brain.

Like the time I discontinued a brief relationship after I told the passing soon partner, “My daughter doesn’t think we’re right together’.  That went over like a turd in the clam chowder.   The soon to be distanced connection sounded more like a drunk sailor fighting a marine after that let down.  I was told I was rude, mean and self centered. Numerous profanity peppered the entire response.  And I’m pretty assuredly convinced she thought I was doing this on my own.  But it really was my daughter’s idea.  And the fledgling relationship had only existed for about three weeks.  Never led anyone on.  Honest.  

I spent the next fortnight trying to rethink how I might have ended the whole glob of a doomed relationship. There had to have been a more appealing way to let someone off the elevator.   But I was pretty sure my female offspring knew the two party system in this case wouldn’t work.  Still, she was initially helpless in instructing me how I could have concluded the breaking off a little more tactfully.  I told her what transpired.  She never apologized.  She never will.  

She has backed off a bit.  I took time to raise my sons and didn’t date much.  Saw old acquaintances and spent friendship time with the past memories who were different now.  Not interested in much more than that.  Giving her a break I suppose.  But she knows.  If I mention someone, she can analyze that potential prom date just by the way I say the name.  Then she asks the right questions, and poof!  Relegated to no more than friendship or “Dad, go for it

I don’t know if, in the cases she manages to see into, if she’s right or wrong, but if someone were to tell me to play the odds on it, I would always go with who she is and what she is.  Don’t make me take sides.  You’ll lose.  

Of course, it has to be an addendum, a couple of times she called it in a potential squeeze’s favor.  She was right. She still chastises me for one conked out ‘the two of you’ that she hoped would be.  Circumstances didn’t allow the relationship to bloom with flowers continuing to brighten the branches, but she wished it could have worked out.  “She’d be good for you, Dad.”  I was sad when it all turned away.  She felt my hurt.  

I know she wishes relationship nirvana on me.  Her mother will probably always be her deepest wish, to which I am only guessing.  It’s rarely said in words.  I just sense she wishes us both happiness, and if it’s together or in different channels of life, she knows which persons would work.  

I don’t look.  I wait.  If someone comes along who feels, creates and in conjunction with me, builds the connection, her heart will bless it.  If her daughterly instincts tell her to put the kibosh on it, I am of the positive inclination she will, once again, not apologize for my lack of tact  if I am considered rude in the termination of the relationship.