The 21-year-old comes downstairs at the crack of 10:15am and scratches my back. "Am...am I old enough that...I can just make myself cinnamon toast? Even though I'm not sick?"
I am not a good father. You know those fathers you see on TV—or even in real life!—who are great about teaching their kids how to change their oil and take them to all their hockey practices while it's still dark and go on cross-country vacations to camp in the Grand Canyon and do their homework with them and make sure they're not eaten by rabid badgers and all that? Yeah, that ain't me.
But there is precisely one thing I do really well as a father, and that's make cinnamon toast. Generally, yes, I only do it for each kid a few times a year, when they don't feel well, but since I have 4732879 children, that still means I end up making quite a bit, even if it doesn't seem that way to, say, Kid #7397 (what, like I can remember all their names).
I try to glare at her but my heart is too shattered. The one and only fatherly thing at which I'm even moderately proficient and she wants to rip that single thing away from me.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" she says. "You can make it if you want! I just didn't want to be a hassle."
I get up in a snit (a very manly snit) and go make what is not my finest cinnamon toast ever but is still probably in the top 10% of all cinnamon toasts I've ever created. I keep it in the toaster the exact right amount of time, down to the millisecond. I pretend to hand it to her baby sister, which outrages and horrifies the 21-year-old, before she snatches the plate away, chirps "thank you, Daddy!" and goes into the dining room to eat it.
I sulk down to my office and sit down and that's when it hits me how thoroughly I had just been played.
She's definitely her mother's daughter.
Comments