Fine Sexual Line

Snow thick all over the park, an event in London too rare and exciting for an eleven-year-old daughter to contain her patience for long. The shops quickly selling out of sleds, but one luckily obtained, a plastic disc with a handle, now dragged behind her back up the snowy hill, laughing with her friends, frantically positioning for another slide down it.

Proceedings occasionally halted, a quick run to my side, a breathless summary of the last slide, hey dad did you see how far I went, this sled is amazing. Quick hug, off again. The air filled with laughter from children excited by the thrills and parents thrilled by children’s excitement.

Afterwards, sitting on a sofa watching television, my daughter exhausted, nestled at my side. An interesting dynamic, sometimes she avoids physical contact, sometimes she’s indifferent, other times like today she reaches out. Leaving me to draw a fine fatherly line, welcoming but not overly intimate, warm and inviting when she’s reaching out, unfazed when she’s not.

My wife offering slices of fruitcake. I wonder how things were between her and her father, just one perceived rejection from him, intended or otherwise, and the physical seed of doubt is sown, the sense of being unattractive to men. My daughter unconsciously now applying the same test, sitting beside me, soaking up the idea that her physical presence is something enjoyed by me. Utterly unsexual, more like pre-sexual. When she becomes fully sexual her father will be important only by dint of categorical exclusion.

Thinking about my wife again, that may well be how it started, an edgy relationship with an over-critical father, seeing herself as repellant, mentally putting in place a shield to protect herself against all men, now part of her fabric. Or maybe she was always going to be unsexual, who knows?

My daughter caught up in the television action, some cartoon mouse about to be caught by a fox, her slice of cake suspended in pause between plate and mouth. The mouse escaping, the cake eaten. She jumping up, going off to the next room, some new adventure, physical closeness over. A daughter constructing her worldview, posing a test of some sort for her father, marking criteria not disclosed, results only to be revealed after decades if at all. I hope I did okay.