I am a man in the middle of life, and my biggest regret is that I was never the father I should have been for my two girls. I had an acrimonious divorce many years ago, and barely had any contact with my daughters after that.
My oldest, Brooke, moved out of her mom's house a couple of years ago, and is attending college in a town just an hour away from where I live. My youngest, April, just turned 18, this year, and was still living with her mother when my story begins.
When Brooke started college, she did not contact me right away, and I had no idea where she was living. You see, her mother, my ex, who is a tightly wound religious nut, told my girls all kinds of horrible made-up things about me, so Brooke was wary and was not sure if she even wanted to get to know me.
But, she tells me, that changed when she started college, and as she learned about the real world outside of her mother's religious home-schooling, she began to realize how much of a nut her mother really was, so she started to question all the things her mother had said about me over the years. To my eternal gratitude, Brooke had the courage to track me down and called me.
I was shocked at that first contact. I had been carrying around my guilt for years and to my relief, Brooke was not angry about my lack of involvement, not too angry anyway, she understood my ex, her nutty mother, had made it impossible for me to be involved. She was mostly interested in getting to know me and separating her mother's lies from the truth.
By the third phone call, Brooke told me that my ex had been telling them that I was a sexual deviant, that I was perverted and had wanted her to do unacceptable sex acts. She told them I was obsessed with pornagraphy, that I masturbated constantly, and had tried to get my ex to be a swinger and have sex with other men for my pleasure.
My daughter put it all out there, in one go, and told me she wanted the truth, the whole truth, with nothing left out, because she couldn't tolerate going through life not knowing if her dad was a creep or if it was all lies.
I had to take a long pause because I had not been prepared for this, and it did not feel right to me to try to defend myself against all these accusations on a phone call, so I asked to meet with her in person. She agreed, and soon I was sitting with my beautiful, grown daughter at a coffee shop near the college she attended. I was instantly tantalized. I still recognized the little girl I remembered, but she was a lovely grown woman now. She has a sweet round face. Her personality is serious and reserved, just like me, but on those rare occasions that she smiles, her face glows brilliantly and she makes my heart melt. She laughs with a sardonic almost mischievous glint in her eye.
The first sign of trouble happened the instant I saw her, face to face. She walked up to me with a tentative smile, unsure if it was me. I looked at this amazing young woman and without thinking about it, my gaze swept down her body as I habitually do with beautiful women, and took in her hourglass shape. Her bust line was high on her chest, her small youthful breasts were pert and pointy under her stretchy white top. Her waist was narrow, but she had an incipient belly, giving a softness to her figure. Her hips were generous and I could see all the curvaceous contours of her thighs owing to the tight black tights she was wearing.
As my gaze settled on my daughter's small thigh gap, almost but not quite lost between the softness of her thighs, and on her mound, perfectly molded by her tights, I suddenly caught myself. This is my daughter! The thought yelled itself in my mind. I looked up to her eyes, but it was too late, she had seen me look, and that is how we met. Sometimes, I think that unthinking lear I gave my daughter in that first instant, set the tone and set in motion everything that was to come later. But, maybe I just like to beat myself up. Maybe it would have happened that way anyway. Maybe it wasn't me at all. Maybe it was my daughters and the sexually repressive way they were raised. I think about these things, but in the end, it probably doesn't matter.
I tried to shake hands with her, but Brooke put her arms out and hugged me. It was a quick loose hug, but a hug nonetheless and I began to feel emotional. We ordered and sat, neither of us knowing what to say, at first.
I finally broke the ice by asking her about herself, what she was up to, and how her life had been so far.
Brooke went into a long narrative with many winding side paths. She spoke quickly and nervously. I noticed right away, my daughter was smart and articulate. She was studying sociology with a special interest in family systems. She was living with her boyfriend, and, yes, she told me, they were living in sin, but she did not care about that anymore. Brooke had a rebellious side to her, but she seemed to express it at an intellectual level, questioning all the beliefs and dogma she had been raised with.
She had had a huge tragedy in her life, just a few months before we met in that coffee shop. Her boyfriend had gotten her pregnant. After much thought, she decided to keep the baby. She was going to become a mother, and for a few months, she planned and prepared, only for tragedy to strike with a miscarriage in the fourth month. She told me she had been devastated, but she was now trying to move forward in her life, and meeting me was part of it.
Throughout, she called me David, never Dad. Inevitably, the conversation came around to all the horrible things my ex had said about me. Brooke talked about her conflicted feelings about me and at last she became silent and looked at me, implicitly wanting answers.
I took a deep breath, because I knew it was complicated. Not everything my ex had said was a complete fabrication. Some of it was at least partially true.
"Here's the thing," I started to explain, "your mom and I are very different people. As you know, she is very religious, and I'm not. Your mom was inexperienced and very shy about her body, but I was a young man with a healthy sex drive and I had been around the block a few times."
I looked at Brooke to see how she was taking it so far, and she looked pensive but attentive, so I continued. I did my best to explain to my daughter, that her mom had wanted to leave the church when she married me and I was trying my best to give her the experiences she had missed out on. I never wanted to pressure or force her to do anything she didn't want to do, but I wanted to encourage her to try new things, for her sake, not for mine.
I did my best to answer Brooke's questions completely openly and honestly, just like she had asked me to. I admitted to my daughter I had tried to get her mother to try oral sex with me, but she never came around to it. Yes, I had asked her once to try anal, but she had nixed that idea, immediately. I admitted to Brooke that, yes, I like pornagraphy, but nothing weird or deviant, and I admitted to her right there in the coffee shop, that when my wife, her mother, stopped having sex with me, I started masturbating instead, but it was only because I didn't want to impose on my wife when she clearly didn't want me.
"What about swinger, thing? Did you try to get my mom to have sex with other men?" Brooke asked me bluntly, her face an unreadable mask.
"Well, yes," I started, "but let me explain. It was more like, I wanted to give her permission to have sex with other men. By that time, it was clear to me that your mother was no longer attracted to me, and I felt bad because I was the only man she had ever been intimate with. I never wanted to watch her get it on with other guys, and I never asked to have sex with other men's wives. I only invited her to try having sex with one or two other men, so she could have the experience and figure out want she liked and what she wanted, but your mother took it all wrong and I'm afraid that was the end of it. She said she was never going to see me or talk to me again and that she would never let me see you girls."
Brooke sat back and seemed to process it all. She gave me a sympathetic look and told me she wanted to believe me. We parted at that with the promise that we would get together again soon.
The next time I heard my daughter's voice, she was crying hysterically over the phone and I could barely make out what she was saying, at first. Then it became clear. Her boyfriend was dumping her and kicking her out. She was begging me to come pick her up and take her home with me.
It was eleven thirty at night and I was in my sweats. I grabbed the keys to my truck and I ran out the door.
I found her standing on the curb with a couple of bags. She was wearing a long coat over her nightgown. She was quiet and sullen on the drive home. Occasionally she turned away from me as she quietly wept. I was never good at consoling crying women, and it was no different with my daughter. Every time I tried to say something to her, she just looked away from me and started crying again.
Back home, I did my best to welcome her into my little one bedroom apartment. I quickly made my bed up for her and took a blanket to the couch in the living room for myself. She didn't argue. She just sat on my bed, with a silent frown and tears streaking her face. I tried to hug her, but she just sat motionless, so I let it go.
For my own nerves as much as hers, I dug a bottle of Bacardi out of a cupboard and poured rum and cokes for both us. I sat next to her on my bed and we drank wordlessly together. When I was done, I rubbed her back, and said, stupidly, "things will get better." Brooke laid her head on my shoulder and cried some more. "Thank you for trying," she said finally, and I left her at that, leaving the unfinished bottle with in the bedroom with her and closed the door.
Despite all the excitement, the Bacardi worked its magic and put me to sleep out on my couch. Sometime in the night, I woke up and made my way to the bathroom. As I live alone, I opened the bathroom door unthinkingly.
I was shocked into the memory that my daughter was in the house when I found her there, naked as the day she was born, looking at herself in the full length mirror.
Her youthful breasts were high and upstanding and they swayed gently as she turned to me. Brooke had no pubic hair and as she turned I was presented with the delicacy of her bareness, her labia hidden in the soft swells of her outer lips.
