Day XXIII – My Daughter Bit Me in the Head

You may think it’s perfectly natural for a Prop daughter to bite her father in the head. It’s part of her coming of age, a rite of passage. It actually isn’t, and she didn’t. We were playing in the pool and she dove on me (drowning your father IS a normal rite of passage in our family) teeth first. My daughter regularly bludgeons me with words until I’m senseless so this was slightly less traumatic. Luckily she sank them into my skull instead of smacking them sideways and maybe knocking them loose. It was time to get out anyway so I put my hand on my bleeding head and we went in for the night.

It makes me think of all the other crazy things kids do or say. My youngest turned to my middle Prop the same day at lunch and asked, “are you going to wear that same outfit all day?” Apparently it is proper custom for young girls to change their clothes several times a day thus forcing their mother to scratch off several more sanity points on her character sheet and making her take several more trips to the bulk store for the community sized laundry detergent.

My youngest usually comes down to breakfast after everyone else is already sitting at the table. She wears this ratty old robe and has a look on her face that says, “where are my cigarettes?” Usually the first thing she asks for, in a raspy, nicotine torn voice is “is there any coffee?”

Yesterday she showered herself (a blessing, but the beginning of her development into womanhood as now there will be growing and blossoming that I (thank god) will not be a direct witness of) and brushed her own hair. She somehow managed to affect the comb-over look so sought after by overweight, middle-aged men afflicted with male pattern baldness. She has more hair than the average Afghan Hound and she came down smiling and looking like Uncle Bob. I don't know how she did it.

I racked my brains and I can't think of anything I did that was crazy or really out there. Everything I did growing up seemed perfectly normal and logical. I'm sure most of you think the same. I'm sane, everybody else is crazy.

The only thing I can think of is my old Scoutmaster used to wave his hand in the air in a "I'm-slapping-you-in-the-face" motion and tell us to "walk into this" when we had done something stupid. I remember that once I actually did walk into it. Before he realized what I had done he hit me several times.

He was NOT one of those Scoutmasters who would touch the boys, either in a corpral or in an erotic way. He was so startled that I don't remember him ever offering that choice to another Scout.

I had a friend that told me that one day his wife woke him up and led him downstairs where he found his two young sons sitting, green-faced. They had woken early, as boys are wont to do, gotten tired of the drivel on TV and decided to play "breakfast." They took all their Play-doh and rolled it into little, colorful balls in their cereal bowls, poured in milk and ATE IT. Yes, that's right, they ate ALL their Play-doh. I think my friend said thirteen cans of the stuff.

Now, growing up as a boy, which I did, with three younger brothers, we ate, or at least tried a lot of things, dog biscuts, dog treats, plastic aligator tails (no that's right, my brother shoved that up his nose and left it there so long that his mucus membranes started to rot, which my Dad smelled it and took him to the hospital to get removed). We even tried Play-doh. It tastes like, well, it tastes like Play-doh, lousy.

What did my friend say to his eldest (who at 8 should have known better than to feed himself and his four year old brother Milton Bradley products), his heir-aparent, his pride and joy, his first born, his SON? He said, "you know that’s not food."