“These girls, I don’t know them,” Father said. “They are an embarrassment to my existence. A scourge upon my reputation.” He never asked for children in the first place, so to be met with ones like these was, well, not ideal. Probably worse than anything he could have ever envisioned. These “toys” that didn’t quite fit into the toy box of polite, respectable society. Carina and Adriana were three years apart, the latter an unexpected surprise. Mainly because their mother, Imelda, had asked Father to get a vasectomy, and, like many men, he assured her he would and then simply didn’t. Who knows what men think is going to happen when you lead a woman into a false sense of security like that? Of course it’s going to backfire. Go horribly awry in the worst way possible. Which is to say, result in an unwanted child. Like Adriana. 

This wasn’t to say that Carina was wanted either. At least not by Father. He felt duped by Imelda. She had been one of those women who swore up and down while they were dating that she wasn’t interested in having children. It turned out to be a calculated ruse, and Father ought to have known better. But by the time he figured things out, it was too late. The first daughter was brewing, and it filled him with absolute terror. As it happened, he was right to be scared. Although Carina initially seemed like a sort of raw clay that he could mold to fit his “needs” and will, she soon proved to be even more disappointing than Adriana as the years wore on…though each revealed themselves to be raging embarrassments in their own unique fashion. Father would do his best to “guide” them, to “steer” them in something like the “right” direction, but, every time he did, it was as though they deliberately went the exact opposite way. Almost like they wanted to spite him. To make him dismayed. 

Father never seemed to take into account that it wasn’t easy to have an old guard patriarch. Someone so rooted in the kind of baby boomerism more attached to the forties and fifties than it was to the sixties. The latter decade at least had ties to rebellion and counterculture that made boomer parents born in that era inherently more, let’s just say…“open.” The antithesis of what forties and fifties-era boomers represent. And Father was born right at the very beginning of the baby boomer epoch, so he was positively fascist in his viewpoints on life, how the world should be and certainly what a woman should be. Thus, he would say things to Carina and Adriana like, “Play properly” or “Act like a lady.” Whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean. Of course, both knew what it meant—that they ought to be tamer and more docile—they just couldn’t believe someone living in the twenty-first (or even the twentieth) century could still have these attitudes and ideas about women. But then, the Taliban still runs Afghanistan, so go figure. Maybe Father was more “evolved” than some men. Some. 

As he watched his daughters grow apart from him (not that he ever felt that close to them to begin with), as is the way with many parent-child relationships over time, he still kept tabs on them from afar. Even when they assumed he wasn’t looking. But he was there, lurking on their social media accounts. He might have been a boomer, but he was apparently shrewd enough to know how to follow an account. Both daughters initially bristled when they saw his handle—the terse and prosaic Richard1948—suddenly popping up on their screen. But since he never interacted with any posts, it was easy for them to forget he existed online at all, let alone could see their every move. Or rather, the moves they posted. Many of which were literal, as dance crazes hadn’t been such a thing since the 1980s, when both daughters were born. Having no idea that the world in store for them—the world that Father forced them into as much as Imelda, yet that he seemed to want to take no responsibility for—would be such a difficult place to inhabit.

If there were characteristics he couldn’t stand about his daughters, then it was clear he ought to look within himself for the reasons why. Not just because he was perhaps as jealous of as he was disgusted by them. Of their ability to be “do-nothings” who posted frivolous “vignettes” from their life all day long instead of worrying about making money. About shedding the same blood, sweat and tears that he had to back “in his day.” Yet, oddly, parents like him were always going on about how they wanted their kids to have a better life than they did. And then, when that goal is achieved, they seem to regret it. Seem to wish that they had furnished their children with the same “school of the hard knocks” upbringing that might have built character instead of making them so goddamned lily-livered. Totally absent of gumption or problem-solving skills other than the go-to, tried-and-true method of calling up Father and asking him for help (read: money). It really irked him, even though he would insist he wanted his children to have it “easy.” Or rather, easier than he did. But maybe not so fucking easy. Shit. 

Part of him blamed himself for being the enabler. Imelda wanted them to stand on their own two feet from the beginning. Wanted to give them a “loose leash” in their teenhood so they could make mistakes and learn from them. But Imelda couldn’t possibly understand the horrors of being the father to teenage girls. It was like being forced to sleep with your eyes open and stand on your toes at all hours of the day, just waiting for some predator to appear and snatch or defile your young. Imelda didn’t get it. Even though she had been a teenage girl once, she had never fathomed what her own father was tasked with in “watching over” her.

Which he clearly did, because she couldn’t manage to lose her virginity until she skirted off to college. That was really saying something, in terms of her father’s monitoring skills. Or maybe just his ability to scare away teenage boys (and even some “boys” who were older than that, too). Whatever the case, the bottom line was that Imelda couldn’t even begin to comprehend where he was coming from. That he had a tightening in his chest—a severe sense of anxiety—all the time. The constant fear that something could and would happen to one or both of them. And even if he often felt as though he couldn’t possibly be related to these nitwit bitches, let alone have provided half of the “raw material” that would help form their eventual personalities, he also couldn’t turn his back on them. 

Father just needed to know that they were all right. Even if it meant seeing things on their social media accounts that he often didn’t really want to. With Carina, it was grandiose, false portrayals of her existence that seemed to highlight just how much she was living on her credit card (de facto how much Father would end up having to spend on those lavish trips she told herself she was taking with “her own money”). With Adriana, it was being forced to watch her often ho-ish videos that usually involved her either starting out naked or getting to that point by the end of the clip. He didn’t understand what the fuck they were actually “doing.” From what he could tell, it was a whole lot of nothing. And it greatly humiliated him. More than that, it hurt him. Because, from his vantage, he was watching two people for whom he had poured massive amounts of money into so that they could get the best education, the best training for “life,” only to see that both of them appeared to be avoiding it altogether by creating their respective distorted realities. And the more he watched their so-called day-to-day lives, the more disgusted he felt. 

Imelda, who still worked long days at her job at the hospital, did not have as much time to pay attention to what their daughters were doing (or more like “not doing”), therefore didn’t seem as preoccupied with “worry.” As far as she was concerned, her daughters simply were who they were, and there was no sense trying to change that now. One Sunday afternoon, however, her curiosity was piqued, and she asked Father to show her what he was looking at…which happened to be Carina’s latest bombastic vacation photo. She was currently “on tour” in the Cook Islands—God (or, more accurately, Father) knew how much that was costing her. But she didn’t care; she was “living for the Insta.” The irony, of course, was that no one ever even liked her shit so who was she really trying to impress? The whole deranged spectacle was eating away at Father when he thrust his phone into Imelda’s hands so she could see for herself. 

When she shrugged and said nothing, Father finally snapped, “These girls, I don’t know them.” (He had a tendency to lump both together whenever one did something he was appalled by, even though they were both very much their own individual people). He then concluded to Imelda, “They are an embarrassment to my existence. A scourge upon my reputation.”

Imelda laughed, “And not mine?” 

“You’re the one who wanted them so badly, didn’t you? And for what? So they could contribute nothing to society?”

“Oh come on Richard. Maybe just living their life happily is enough of a contribution.” 

“It’s not. It’s a disgrace is what it is.”

“Not to them. And not to me.”

He guffawed. 

Imelda continued, “I don’t understand what you detest so much about them. You’re treating them like they’re a pair of Gonerils and Regans, when, in fact, what you’ve got are a pair of Cordelias.”

Father balked. “I doubt that. They’ve both got their hands in my back pocket at every turn.”

“And not mine?”

Father froze.

Imelda added, “Lest you forget, I make the higher salary. And you don’t see me complaining about sharing some of it with them every now and again.”

“Now and again?! It’s practically every day.”

“Well, be that as it may, I wouldn’t trade them for all the money in the world. I want them here, exactly as they are. Maybe you need to learn how to feel the same way.”

Father glanced back down at Carina’s decadent snorkeling photo taken in the Cook Islands, then scrolled past to get it out of his sight, only to see a naked image of Adriana. No, he couldn’t accept them as they were. Absurd layabouts feasting from his financial trough at their age. It was untenable. And since he couldn’t say such things to Imelda, he walked outside and screamed them into the wind.