Did You Say Penis? I Thought You Said Penis! Penis!

I wish I'd never studied psychology. I wish I didn't know about Freudian slips or marker locution, or any of that psycholinguistic, semiotic mumbo jumbo because if I didn't, then I wouldn't know my daughter's got procreation on the mind 24/7. I used to live in a disabused state of blissful ignorance. Now, I get this.

Dad: Hey, can somebody get this bag of dog food off the table?
Sarah: What!? Dad, did you say penis?!

Dad: You want a glass of orange juice?
Sarah: OMG! Dad said penis!

or

Dad: . . . so you have to divide the quadratic dividend into the coefficient of fourteen to get zero for a.
Sarah: Did you say penis?

I know I'm supposed to realize she's grown up, that she'sa woman now. I know I'm supposed to realize her hormones are raging through her like the Niagra filling a teacup. I know. But I don't want to know. I want to remain the blissful inebriate king I was when she thought she was Pochahantas, when she said she was going to grow up and marry a cartoon.

By definition I am a Dad because I am the sole male progenitor of my own spawn. But by habit, I'm fairly certain I am a mom as I spend most of my day doing laundry and cleaning floors. I am the limo. I am the grocer. And I am he who obtains pads. I've learned to deal with a lot of womanstuff and I think I do it with all the aplomb such trans-traditional-parenting requires. Once you find yourself standing in the HYGIENE aisle on your cell asking your daughter if she needs heavy or regular flow kotex, your manhood's pretty much a wash.

But the sex line is one I will approach fully Gandalphed. I'll wag my beard, staff stabbed into stone, and thunderously proclaim YOU SHALL NOT PASS! And my daughter will poke her head around the kitchen door and ask: "Did you say penis?"

As a boy, I had sex on the brain with the same drooly retardation as any other kid. I just didn't know girls did that too. I really didn't. Like my father before me, I found it hard to believe girls even pooped, much less thought about peen. But having replicated into the opposite gender, I have had all my girl illusions shattered like porcelain princess dolls run over by a van full of girls-gone-wild videos. When I was a kid, I didn't know:

• Girls fart.


• Girls name their boobs.


• Girls think about sex.


• All the time.


• God help me.

This illusion, I think, serves some evolutionary purpose. I don't know if it's Darwinian or Lemarkian evolution, but it came out of a desire for fathers to ensure their girls marry someone who is as smitten and retarded about them as their father, because that narcoleptic effect allows the girls to remain in control for years, giving them time to establish their man as something just above the level of pack mule.

I like the illusion. I like being ignorant. I like it enough that I'm inches away from stabbing my eardrums with an ice-pik so I can remain deaf and stupid and not hear my daughter say the word penis. I don't care if she grows up to be a fluid dynamics scientist and wins a Nobel prize for her invention of a urinary canal replacement device, I don't want to hear the P word come out of her mouth ever again.

As I've remarked before, my girl was born deep into the aftermath of the sexual revolution. She has the exact plans for herself as any Victorian railroad tycoon's first born son: that she will receive an alarmingly expensive quality education at a college built during the age of steam; that she will walk out of that college into a job in science or law, promptly receiving a salary slightly smaller than a wrongful death payoff; that she will rock a sweet convertible from day one, vacation in luxurious leisure villas on exclusive island mountain resorts; that she will marry a man just as smart and witty as she is who will immediately give birth to and raise her nine children.

I said as much recently as the family frequented the best new sushi joint in Chicago, Makisu, which is actually in Skokie. We were all sitting around the table sinking our teeth into a plate of White Dragon maki when the wine and the joise d' vive washed over me and I said I was so happy, that my kids seemed destined to do well, that I was really proud of my daughter's acceptance into a summer Arabic language program.

Dad: I'm so proud of you.
Daughter: [snorting Rame cola through her nose] Did you say penis?

Bras Cause Cancer!

The daily argument between the teen-manga-rock star and myself went martian today when I gave her her daily admonishment to strap on a brazier.

"You mean put on a straight jacket for my boobs?"

"Yeah. Please?"

"I can't believe you want me to restrain my womanhood!"

"I'm not--your what?"

"Bras cause breast cancer, dad!"

"WHAT!?"

"Everybody knows that."

"No they--"

"Leave me alone! Let my boobs run free!"

I gave up. Sometimes all a parent can do is stare, mouth agape,
high speed electric drill poised over their forehead, and hope that guy from Scrubs doesn't play you in the movie.

----------------------------------

I'm Ready for my Close Up

During Halloween I was stuck in the back of Party City waiting for my daughter to try on her "Shame Daddy" costume. They make room for all the costumes by shoving everything unhalloweenic into the back aisle which is how I discovered my newest parenting tool: the air horn.

This is a father's dream toy and I don't know how I've gone so long without one.

Having trouble waking your little princess? FRONK!

Everybody talking at once during Robot Chicken? FRONK!

Skimpy shirt violation by girlteen? FRONK!

[My Attorney] may shoot me any day now as she does not see the intrinsic humor in quietly opening the bathroom door and FRONKING! her shower.

Still, all the FRONKING! in the world won't make my daughter move out of mosey mode. She could shuffle down hill. On skates. So we found ourselves stuck in the Chicago rush hour traffic we usually just barely miss. She has her make up kit in her hand and she's clicking it like a nervous Lehman Brothers loan officer. I keep suggesting she go ahead and put on her make-up but she declines with a mumble, staring out the window like a thorazine test dummy.

I'm scanning through FM looking for music that doesn't make me want to stab myself in the eyes from exhausted hope for good radio in Chicago. Every station is playing suck: bad ardent 80s synth pop, bad 80s repetitive Irish pop, easy listening, polka. Each three seconds of sampled music makes my daughter roll her eyes so hard I think she's going to affect the rotation of the earth itself. Finally something with the correct alchemy of beat and lyrics pops out of the speakers and it's like awakenings, she snaps out of it and starts putting on her makeup and I realize, she was just waiting for her theme music.

And I want to FRONK! so bad because I think this is a violation of her path to total cooldom. I think it should go the other way around and she should apply her makeup according to whatever music is playing, not wait for her current sonic obsession. So if country comes up, she should lay it on thick and blue with ruby red nautical level red hull plaster on her lips. Or if it's classical then just some burnt sienna and no sun for a week. Or if its goth, then bury your head in a vat of chalk.

While she's applying her lip lacquer, "No One Knows," by Queens of the Stone Age, comes on and together we lunge for the volume knob to crank it to a level you can use to mine cadmium, and I realize we share a musical helix of considerable worth. We rocket down North Ave hair rocking to Queens with all the gleeful pomp and indignity of Garth and Wayne. Then "Take Me to Funky Town," comes on and the ironic perfection of it's just too much for us and we go robot disco at the stop light in full view of beautiful people in Escalades on their cellphones. We don't care. It's "Funky Town," for the love of Christ: ironic retro disco fealty must be paid.

I realize that we share distressingly similar sick limits. We both laugh--hysterically--at that robot chicken promo when the gummy bear gets its foot stuck in a bear trap. I mean, H Y S T E R I C A L L Y.  And that's great. I know that for the rest of our life, our intrinsic taste in psychotic twisted humor and heavy metal will keep us from going nuts all at the same time. In the long run, it'll be cheaper.

Who Ordered a Sleep Disorder?

A couple of months ago, my daughter started falling asleep in class. We noticed her grades were slipping. Her mornings got weird, with her nearly impossible to wake up. She slept in the car on the way to school, in class, in the car on the way back, on the couch before supper, in her chair at supper, on the couch after supper, in the shower . . . she was sleeping anywhere from 12 to 16 hours a day.

She started missing school. First she missed morning classes. Soon, she missed entire days. Finally, she missed three days in a row. Asleep.

Besides sleeping all day, she was gaining weight. A lot of weight. She was depressed. She was irritable. And sometimes, she was out of her mind. Her mother woke her one morning and she started screaming. She flailed around then stopped, for an instant, and stared at us like we'd just appeared out of thin air and cried out What is going on?! Then she wept. We realized that she wasn't actually awake until that instant before she asked what was going on.

We took her to an endocrinologist who did a full mark-up and found nothing. No reason for her to gain weight, no anomalies that might point to excessive sleeping. We took her to a psychologist who said she was depressed but offered no cure. We took her to her psychiatrist who, finally, a woman of excessive intelligence, suggested a sleep specialist.

The sleep doctor gave us a couple of tools to measure her sleep patterns. The result was insane. Sarah had a 'free running sleep delay'. Her natural onset of sleep was being delayed two hours every night. This resulted in her natural sleep schedule of 7 hours a night to occasionally bump up against itself and double up. It seemed random but it wasn't. On a chart, it looked like a spiral.

This disorder screws up a kid's circadian rhythm, the natural alignment of the body clock with daytime hours. Her body literally didn't know what time it was. It was running blind.

She also has sleep apnea from some kind of obstructive aspect of her throat. Though she is unconscious, she is not actually sleeping. In the lab, they said she woke up 17 times every hour and was getting less than 2 hours of real sleep every night.

This two problems combined to throw a bunch of her body-clock dependent processes off schedule or shut them down. She was irritable because she wasn't getting any sleep. She occasionally woke up crazy because she wasn't actually waking up. She was gaining weight because her body couldn't get all of it's maintenance done while she was unconscious but not asleep. She was depressed because she rarely saw daylight.

As of this article, Sarah has withdrawn from the Super Hero High School she was attending, one of the top 5 high schools in the nation and is working via correspondence. She is trying to use a CPAP machine but keeps ripping the mask off in the middle of the night. We haven't been able to realign her circadian schedule and as I type at 5pm on a Sunday, she's been 'asleep' since last night at 9:30.

I know most of my posts are supposed to be funny, but this blog is about parenting first and poop jokes second. Being a good parent is incredibly difficult and recognizing then fixing the myriad problems teenagers can face is hard. When a problem seems to originate from the eldritch imagination of a horror writer, it can be terrifying.

This article is the first in a series following our efforts to cure Sarah of this sleep disorder and get her back into school and in shape and sane by September. It also will serve as a means to educate other parents and commiserate with them about this wild card teen issue. I know, I know, regular readers are all throwing their hands in the air and wondering: yo, Chris, where are the fart jokes? They're here, they're in the other parts of the website. And know this, throughout this ordeal, Sarah is performing splendidly, accepting this issue philosophically, and most important, the most telling indication of what a remarkable and rare person she is: with a sense of humor.

Why Men Shouldn't Watch Sex in the City with their Teen Daughters, for the love of Christ!

I may have mentioned that [My Attorney] and I are somewhat liberal in our parenting values. I should say we are a weird mix of Catholic conservatism and freak hippy liberalism. I.g., I don't care if my kids cuss but I don't want them cussing in front of my relatives or on Easter Sunday. This also means that while we have raised our little girl with the care and attention and best education regarding sex we can possibly find and/or afford, and while we realize that we can't raise her to be a sophisticated genius AND a prude, we remain mortified whenever she proves the level of sophistication she has achieved vis-a-vis a clinical understanding the humdrum sex lives of most Americans.

I am regularly distressed by some wry comment or the sound of her laughing to a dirty joke I didn't know she could hear, distressed because she gets it which means she understands it which means AAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGHHH!!!!! It makes my brain shrivel. But this point of view has been coming at us like a glacier on skates since she started rocking her traveling boob display case wardrobe and being beautiful on purpose. Also, my daughter is a measurable and certified genius, gets a 4.0 at Superhero High School, and can, as she displayed at th Rusty Armadillo rooftop Margarita oasis yesterday, explain RNA versus DNA protein transference through cell wall membranes, from memory--IN THE MIDDLE OF SUMMER. So when [My Attorney] suggested we invite her and her visiting highly sophisticated artist cousin to watch it with us (she's been iTuning it and letting them watch) I didn't think twice. I just took my customary chair, patted my daughter on the head, clicked the remote and AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!

It was porn. I mean, ok, it was porn if you're Mormon. But still, as sophisticated and aloof and urbane as I'd like to blieve I really am, I spent most of the show with my face buried in my hands while [My Attorney] fumbled wildly with the complicated PAUSE ACTUATOR SEQUENCE INITIATION DEVICE and my daughter howled with mirth at our silly bourgeois prudishness--and the face of the guy doing the horizontal mambo over the shoulder of one of the main characters.

But I made it through this important plot device at the very opening of the show and thought "it can't get any worse" until it did and an entire storyline was devoted to one woman being hugely disappointed by her new boyfriends not being, um, huge. The conversation on the screen proceeded through a discourse on the value of a boyfriends', um, added value, that it was over before I could heave a chair through the gas plasma screen and I was left, again, glaring at [My Attorney] who was laughing so hard she could barely breathe, all while my daughter screamed.

This is coming on the heels of our most recent family movie, scheduled at the last minute when the DARK KNIGHT was, again, sold out at our favorite luxurious theater, and we said oh, ok, let's got see Wanted, which is a really REALLY good movie for eleven year old boys and 15 year old girls if, a) you really want them to see a guy banging his best friend's girlfriend against the sink during his lunch break while he checks his watch and, b) the kind of high definition entry and exit wounds that would make Sam Pekinpah shoot himself for being such a loser with his paltry slomo dime shot shots.

But the flip side is the best-friend-betrayer and his girlfriend get a non-lethal and wholly justified comeuppance in Wanted which (I hope) teaches the leeches that bad manners will get you a swift backhand from former friends and gratuitous sex is stupid.

As for watching SATC with my daughter, you can bet your adze it ain't happening again. I truly don't mind if she watches it with [My Attorney] but I hope to never have to sit through another HBO porn shot in the same room as my burgeoning goth princess.

My kids are TRYING to be the death of me.

Driving miss crazy

Once again I ventured out into the wild to teach my daughter how to drive. I love her and I have massive respect for her ability as an artist and muffin cook but as a driver, she is OH MY GOD LOOK OUT!

How bad? First words out of her mouth: This is the brake? Sooooo, this is the gas?

It did not inspire confidence.

But I know it's not always as bad as it seems to the parent desperately trying to shove their brake foot through the passenger side floorboard.

But my job is to inspire confidence and bring her to a level of pilotus automobilius that will allow me to send her on important errands like getting me an emergency Partagas Maduro. We need her to go get McDonald's, gas, drive her brother to school, and pick up another metric ton of Diet Coke.

So I swallowed my fear and kept a calm exterior as she braked at green lights, changed lanes without looking, drove over a curb and generally left a wake of destruction and terror from Cicero and Elston all the way to Costco in Skokie.

And the confidence trick is working. She's already dismissing poorly parked cars with a roll of her eyes and she's beginning to curse with genuine aplomb. But I am perhaps providing a disservice as her skills don't quite match her game face. I want her to be confident, I do, but I also want her to quit asking, this way is right, right?

13 Things on Thursday I Could Have Been Doing Besides Standing In Line at the Doctor's Office With a Jug of My Daughter's Urine

1. Anything else.


2. Taking over Leichtenstein.


3. Learning how to spell Liechtenstein.


4. Smuggling ocelots.


5. Growing an elaborate beard.


6. Learning conversational Greek.


7. Pimping out a smart car.


8. Worrying about the economy (oh wait, I did that).


9. Shaving highly literate quotes into my sideburns.


10. Fixing the grammar on local produce center window signs (pickle's 88 cent's!)


11. Yo quieroing my taco bell.


12. Snake dancing on a black volcanic beach in the Maldives.


13. Getting some flash added on to my grill.

Poll: Bra or No Bra?

Here's the thing. I think my daughter ought to corral her mustangs because it's good for them. However, I have a limited man knowledge of these things. I assume that by parking your zeppelins in a hangar, they remain protected from the effects of gravity, wind, and rain. I've always assumed this is good for the longevity of youthful vitality so that one's headlights shine brightly well into one's adulthood.

But what is the practical value of the device?

--------

13 ways to say "My Cousin Marge is Visiting"

1. Rampaging Orc Horde.


2. Pierre is in Town.


3. Crimson Tide.


4. Monsoon Wedding.


5. Mighty Mighty Bosstone.


6. My Little Hula Girl is Playing Ragtime.


7. Punctuation Marks.


8. SHUT UP! JESUS! CAN'T YOU, JUST--GOD! I HATE YOU! GIMME A CIGARETTE!


9. I LOVE YOU!


10. SHUT UP!


11. I'm working on my ribs sauce.


12. You don't love me any more!


13. Mommy's special time (hide the knives . . . )

------

13 things you don't want to hear from your daughter's boyfriend

1. How's the weather down there?


2. Sorry about breaking your fingers with my handshake.


3. I was voted most likely.


4. My Dad works in, uh, waste management.


5. Your blog is cute.


6. I bench 300.


7. Here's a hundred--buy yourself something nice.


8. Yeah, the '07 Mazarattis are nice but I prefer the custom '08 model my dad bought me--faster, you know?


9. My parents run a nude beach--we're meeting them for dinner.


10. I'll have her back by eleven. AM.


11. Yes, Ma'am.


12. Wanna see my Elvis impersonation?


13. Dad?