*For father's day my dad was asked to read a little something for his church in Houston. In turn, in expert fatherly action, he asked his kids to write it for him, this is what I submitted to him*
If you are a father with a daughter in the crowd, really the
only strong piece of advice I can give you is to shower your daughter with not
only love, but your undivided attention.
I’m not talking about watching TV together or going to her sports games,
or just being in the same room together tolerating each others’ presence. I am talking about taking the time out of
your day to turn off your cell phone, look away from sports center, and ignore
everything else in the room but your daughter.
Sit down and talk to her. Ask her
questions about what she thinks, how she feels, and why she feels it. Then verbalize how unconditionally awesome of
a person she is and how nothing she could do will ever change that.
I emphasize doing this because the message that fathers send
to their daughters in the early stages of their childhood (and throughout life
for that matter) makes a resounding impact on the rest of their lives and who
they then chose as mates of their own. I
have had the opportunity to live an incredibly adventurous life spanning a few
states, and three continents. I have
observed my share of romances and friendships between the sexes blossom into incredibly
beautiful entities to behold. I have
also seen them explode into firery flames that engulf the life that surrounds
them. I still have no idea just what
exactly goes on in a male mind – I imagine it’s quite dark and murky - so I
can’t really speak for them. There is one thing that I can tell others with
certainty about girls:
A girl whose father fails to show her adequate undivided
attention, dooms her to spend the rest of her life desperately searching for
someone to appreciate her ‘attention deficit’.
Constantly they seem to be jumping through attention grabbing hoops and
playing games with incredibly high emotional stakes. From a fly on the wall’s
perspective, that looks quite exhausting and incredibly painful. Fortunately, I stand apart from the crowd of
girls who have an attention deficit and stand with those that have attention
profit. It’s much more enjoyable to be
in the attention profit crowd, we tend to prefer the company of a beach cruiser
and cobble stones to people that don’t think we’re unconditionally
awesome.
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