So, my 10yo and I have a pretty great relationship. She’s smart and funny and curious and all the things I might have hoped I could raise a kid to be. That said, she idolizes her mom. As much as she is like me, Daddy is definitely the “boring” parent, because my job is stupider than my wife’s and also much less demanding, so I do all the routine stuff. I don’t want to play it up; like I said she and I get along extremely well, there’s just more “companionable silence” than with mommy. I enjoy being the one doing the field trips, school pickup, doctor’s appointments, etc. We get a lot of good time together, but frankly there’s so much of it that we’d both be exhausted if I tried to make it all scintillating. So, Daddy is important, daddy is loved, but mommy is to be emulated.

One of the most “Dad” things I do (though there are many, let me check my cargo shorts for the notes I took…) is slightly exaggerate the differences in my 90s exurban Florida upbringing and her 2020s suburban Texas upbringing. It being fuckin’ Florida, I don’t actually have to lie, but I do tend to pile on 20 years’ worth of stories from me and my acquaintances to get a rise out of her. It works on Lemmy too! Mommy eggs it on, I think because she secretly sees it as a bonding thing for the two of them. They also bond over not liking boiled peanuts, but wrong as that is, my tolerance knows no bounds, and I love them anyway.

So anyway, kiddo’s clothing choices are generally based entirely on her interests or on things mommy got for her, and god bless ‘em, it is probably for the best (c.f. the aforementioned cargo shorts). Today, though, they are are going on a field trip to the school district’s outdoor learning center. It has been drilled into them that they will be outside, that there will be dirt, that there will be animals, and very specifically that the most common of those animals will be bugs. She doesn’t really like the outdoors (the half-assed hayride at her little Texas cousin’s other grandparents’ place did not go well), and she hates bugs. They advised to wear loose but long-fitting clothes, closed shoes that can get dirty, and just generally to be prepared for a different type of day. I asked if she even wanted to go, but she loves school and her friends generally, and the promise of tame mammals was more than enough.

Today, for the first time that I can recall, my assertive, self-assured, opinionated daughter turned down her many other options and, over her long-sleeve sun-shirt, she chose to wear one of two Florida Gators t-shirts she owns, and not even the cute one with the big orange heart, but the coarse, box-cut thing with an angry, fading mascot (shut up, [email protected], I hear it) in a football uniform, the one even I wouldn’t have bought for her, though I was pleased when her older cousins back in Florida give it to us as a hand-me-down. I am happy, but I am also down to exactly two theories:

1. This is easily her most “disposable” shirt and she doesn’t care at all if it gets ruined.

2. She is more anxious than she’s let on, and much like an eye bead or a crucifix, this choice of a totemic beast of her father’s homeland is to invoke some sort of ancestral magic to protect her from the unknowable horrors of the unexplored. Y’know… a farm. 🤣