Diary of a Gimp

My only daughter is getting married next week, a week from my writing of this entry. It is an unexpectedly emotional time in me.

My daughter has, for all of her life, seen herself as “the one in charge.” Even at the age of 3, when we visited a home improvement store, and she was impressed with it, she announced that one day she would own that chain; not that she would work at one. or even manage a store, but own every store with that name. Yes, she had seen other stores with the same name (or perhaps logo, since to my knowledge, she could not yet read) and determined that they were all part of the same entity.

As a child, she was contentious with my wife and warm towards me, the textbook Freudian Electral Complex. In school, and later in university, the only acceptable grade by her own standard was an “A.” She eschewed other students who seemed to her to be weak or “clingy.”

She met her husband-to-be during the Pandemic. That relationship became cooperative in a way that was unique in her lifetime. At the same time she grew independent of her parents and siblings.

My daughter and I had, from childhood, talked about my taking her down the aisle in my wheelchair. Now the event is imminent, and in a break with tradition, she and her husband-to-be will come to the marriage vows arm-in-arm together. It is fitting when you stop to think of it; she has lived with this man for four years already, and the traditional “giving away” of the bride would be hypocritical. Moreover, my daughter has no temperament for being given away by or to anyone.

After next Saturday, my daughter’s name will be different and she’ll be in a mutually affectionate partnership. At the age of 25 she will have totally become her own woman. Not the fiercely independent woman I always imagined, but one who fostered and became half of a reciprocal relationship.

Like billions of fathers before me, I have become irrelevant, as all fathers do, with all the emotions that elicits in me. But wholeheartedly I wish her and him well, and with them both success in all that they do together and individually.

The generations turn over as they always must. The new generation defines their own reality, one that always is different from and unfathomable to the generations preceding them. So it always has been; so it always will be.

May God forever bless and care for my daughter and her husband!