My Eyes Burned Out by Boobs--Merry Christmas!

(Thanks, Miss Cellania!)

My daughter turns 14 in less than a month. She is distressingly beautiful and walks with a confidence and dominion I can barely get together even now at 42 years old. I can't imagine what it must be like to be almost 14 and have this kind of aplomb. I adore her and I will brag ad infinitum (ask anybody). But I'm having a hard time accepting that 14 is on the downhill side of little girl. This was made alarmingly clear this holiday season when my daughter asked for and received a really expensive dress. When I say really expensive dress, just think of it more like a fancy word for a traveling boob display case.

I'm not really an old fashioned dad. I can't be. I'm the mom. I do the dishes, manage the homework, cook the meals, clean the house, and drive. I quit my job in retail a while back so my wife could join the dark side (Darth Mama) as a patent attorney. I see her for all of eleven minutes a week. I am the quintessential soccer mom except that I'm a man and we do basketball.

Being a man means having habits and appreciations and thoughts that are significantly different from homemakers of olde. I, for instance, don't know squat about girls. Never have. Dating was a total disaster for me until I met my wife and she sat down with me and explained, once, why I was such an unmitigated butthead with women and if I ever wanted to see her naked, I should do a), b) and c) and never d) or e) again, and don't event think about the rest of the alphabet. God bless her. So my daughter has been a walking mystery my whole life and since she hit puberty (like a truck full of dynamite slamming into a BP) and received her mystical Woman-sight she realized I was just another stupid jerk boy and she pretty much quit worshipping me. I'm just a big fat hairy jerkwad now, only good for getting stuff off the higher shelves and charging her iPod. Opening my mouth elicits eye rolling so violent and powerful I fully expect her to need a neck brace.

But my lack of gurrl knowledge is a convenient blind spot for a lot of things, most of all the fact that they tend to turn into women which means that at some point they sprout boobs. Of course I knew this would happen. In fact, it's been happening since she pubernated but I rarely think about them, uh, it. In fact, my mind takes such elaborate routes to avoid the very concept of Daughter Boobs that it's like she's blurry between her waist and neck. I see nostrils and kneecaps--that's it.

On Christmas day my daughter got her dress and promptly put it on. She'd just gotten her first haircut in God knows how long, a haircut administered on the sly by a woman who runs a booth on Michigan ave for a well known department store so hoity it's name can't properly be pronounced without an ounce of black caviar in your mouth. Her hair was Jennifer Anniston good.

The dress I can only describe as a brown crinoline strapless poufy thing that must've required nanotechnology to get it on and looked like it was designed to invoke all the best parts of the 1944 academy awards banquet while simultaneously providing a level and architecturally sound platform for displaying my daughter's winnebagoes.

When I stumbled down the stairs and threw open the door, and my daughter turned to say good morning while wearing her new dress and whirling her Jennifer hair, I automatically submitted to the architecture of the dress and planted my eyes exactly where its engineers intended while simultaneously realizing "Those belong to my daughter," whereupon my eyeballs exploded and a little voice in my head that sounded suspiciously like Charleton Heston's whispered: You, sir, disgust me.

I said Jesus, Sarah, put those away! And here's where things really got weird. My daughter was not only not embarrassed, she realized instantly that she wielded some kind of awesome power over me and instead of demurely tugging up the edge of her expensive haute coteur she loomed her boobs in my direction and said "look dad, booooooobs," and cackled gleefully as I covered my eyes. She cackled!

Although, by degrees, my sight is returning, I have to say: my eyes were opened. I finally get that my daughter, though only 14, is pretty-much grown. More importantly, I have had to take an objective, neautral look at her and accept that she's not only grown, she's drop dead beautiful, smarter than most of the adults I know, highly confident, and working on a kind of wisdom you don't expect from an eighth grader. She's the kind of girl that makes boys run into things and while they are addled and trying get upright she has the capacity and, I bet, the will to talk them into just about anything she wants from moving furniture to investing in bio-tech. Should she decide to follow in her mother's footsteps and go into Law, I have no doubt she will be like some kind of Greek-god force of nature and make ten bajillion dollars before she's 30.

And I suddenly realize what this means. It isn't just that she's sporting new equipment. It's bigger than that. She's coming into her own, assuming the mantle of her glamour, in a time when there are no restrictions on her gender. The fight has pretty much been won. And instead of the fugly hairylegged braless skanks men feared would come out of the ERA, we've got my daughter: super gorgeous highly educated and bristling with glamorous regard. I fear the poor bastards who get in her way.