Father Of The Bride

Tomorrow my daughter is getting married. I can't tell you how long my wife and I have waited for this day. Seriously though, I am happy for her. It's time for her to go out into the world and live her life. Hopefully, her mother and I have prepared her for the adult world and some of what we have said over and over and over again (Can I add another over and over and over again?) will stick with her. I say "some" of what we told her because it will take another ten years before the rest of what we have been saying will finally kick in and become real to her.

By then, her son (and daughter, who is on the way) will be teenagers and she and her husband will find themselves in the unenviable position of sounding like and looking like her mother and I. I was about 36 years old when I said something that my father had once said. I caught myself and I said... "Oh, my God! I sound like him! I sound like a raving lunatic!" Then, I looked in the mirror and I had that look... that weariness around the eyes that all parents get sooner or later when your kids make you want to choke them but, you realize that you're too old and too good looking to go to prison (Okay, one out of two ain't bad!) and you just resign yourself to dealing with whatever they did.

You can't fake that look either. It's there and everybody that knows you can see it in your eyes when it's there. That's the day you go to your mother and father, apologize for everything you ever did, and tell them that "NOW" you understand. Your parents nod and they know that you have truly entered true adulthood. My daughter has already had a couple of those moments with her 3 year old son but, she hasn't really had the breakthrough moment yet... that moment where she truly understands. I believe that she's getting closer to it everyday and she may even get there at an earlier age than her mother and I did (pray for small miracles). But, I digress...

Tomorrow morning, I'm going to walk down the aisle of a church holding my daughter's hand as she prepares to enter a new phase of her life and nobody will be prouder than I. It will be the second happiest walk down an aisle I will have made in my life. The first one being some twenty years ago, when I walked down an aisle with her mother.