Yesterday was one of the best days of my life. For those that follow me on social media, you might have gotten to see how beautiful my daughter looked last night for the daddy daughter dance of 2013. This was the 10th annual dance. I wondered why I had just heard of it this year. Was it my fault for not looking for such a dance or their fault for not making this better known to the community? I settled on %50 shared accountability and left it at that. I can say that I was nervous to some extent going into a new setting with a lot of unknowns is enough to make any man nervous. Some will admit this and some won’t. I was amazed at how many men were truly in tune with their daughter. Then I saw men with their nieces and grandchildren, it really warmed my heart. I thought about how many of those nieces and grandchildren, had able body fathers who just refuses to be a part of her life. I started to get agitated at that thought that any man would totally just walk out on his responsibility. My wife tells me that your child is the only thing that you can guarantee that God gave you. When you do not do right by those angels that he has trusted you with, you will never have peace. So I started looking at all the nieces and grandchildren and wondered what the story was. I thought harder about the nieces and grandchildren who may have lost their father to gun violence. I thought about friends that I have lost to gun violence. I looked around for a brother or his father to see if she was here as somebodies niece or grandchild. No luck.
So when I am in new social settings and I am slightly nervous, I have a tendency to take in as many messages as I possibly can. Meaning I am paying attention to every little detail and I want to understand everything about everything. Maybe I am the only weirdo who does this. I can honestly do this all night if I don’t stop myself. I wanted to make this night special for my daughter so I stopped myself from trying to solve the world’s problems and just concentrated on her. I gave my full attention to Amirrah, right after she said “Are we going to talk over dinner?” Lol I was like “uh, uh, yeah yeah!” My 10 year old daughter was correcting ME on a date! I, of all people, man shoot boy! Lol She just doesn’t know. Just kidding. After she bust me out like that I got on my stuff though. We took pictures and she thought of the poses that we should do. We danced a little bit. We were too over-dressed to really get down. We mainly just talked and walked. Observed things together and taught each other. I started to realize a few years ago that the teaching that goes on between a child and a parent was never meant to be a one way street. The flow of information should be about the same going in both directions. It just takes a wiser ear to hear truth in the whispers of babies. When I and Amirrah danced off of Luther Vandross’s “Dance With My Father Again”, the father and daughter behind us were crying together. The father taps me and says “She told me not to cry and look what she started”. You should have saw how proud that father was to showcase his tears to me! It made me proud. I looked around again at all the men slow dancing with their daughters and thought wow how much genuine love is flowing through this place right now.
To the fathers who were not there with their daughters and they were fully able bodied and not working or doing something that was productive, to you I say 1 year is a long time to have to wait in order to have another swing at bat. What you can do is love her in this moment. Treat her like a queen today so that she knows what standard to set later. I encourage you to do better. I won’t attempt to tear you down because that gets you no where. AND nothing gets solved. When the most important thing is the young woman that God has trusted us with until we are to walk them down the aisle and give them away to another man who may have daughters with our daughters and he must know how to treat our great granddaughters. We set the standards now and build families that will hold close to those and improve them as well. We first have to be men…