Tags
establishing dominance over your teen, loving your teen, parenting a teenager, unorthodox parenting
I live with a man who knows how to keep it interesting. He leaves tendrils of sore-stomach laughing wherever he goes. Here you can see him delightedly displaying a special something that he’s just on his way to the high school to drop off with the school secretary. He’ll instruct this unsuspecting woman to call our daughter down to the office. Our first-born will have an unexpected present to retrieve from there.
I go along with him, because I can’t not, and we hide outside the school, watching through the windows as she and her blissfully ignorant friend cheerfully make their way down the hallway, answering the secretarial summons. Our giddy, idiotic joy is thwarted just a bit as the principal sees us and stops to chat. We’re all like *we’re trying to watch our daughter get her enormous underwear present, Mr. Principal* but without really saying anything like that. Actually all we did was smile and act all mature and parental. We were so mature and parental that we missed the highly anticipated moment. We were saved from an entire disappointment when Anabel caught a glimpse of us through the huge windows looking out onto the courtyard. She and her friend ran out to us, flapping noisily like flustered birds, thrilled but feigning horror over the giant pink panties, which we were delighted to find Anabel had unwrapped from their confining gift bag right in front of the secretary. As he knew she would, Anabel loved the giant pink panties and the strange I-love-you message they carried in their enormous, polyester folds.