Cheer Coach's Blog

Kenny, who was our mascot back in 2001, and the mascot at my Alma Mater, Concordia for a year after that, is now working on a Master's in Communications in London. He recently ended an email to me in a peculiar way.

Later man,
Kenny

PS: I've been wanting to tell you I think too much of your social interaction is with teenage girls. Maybe not too much, but I can really tell you're around them A LOT. I guess my conclusion is that it's funny. You're funny. Not too funny, but funny nevertheless.

What did that MEAN? You think too much of your social interaction is with teenage girls? I don't get it.

Is it that I must act/think/have their kind of sense of humor or something psycho like that? What can I say? Occupational hazzard. If too many of them have wore off on me and I'm now some kid of mutant freak emotionally/socially I guess thats just the price I've had to pay.

Girls need appropriate relationships with men modeled for them. They need dad-figures. Some of them more than others. By no means am I so important or going to save the world or even save any of them.

"Studies show that the risk of juvenile delinquency, substance abuse, sexual abuse, early pregnancy and dropping out of high school is six times higher for children whose biological fathers are not part of their lives."

~By: Hara Estroff Marano, 'Psychology Today'

I'm just a cog in God's machine. He's used them to prepare me to be able to withstand being the real dad to three of them and hopefully He's using me to make some small difference in their lives in the meantime.

Believe me, I hate melodrama and gossip and shopping and shoes as much as the next red-blooded, overweight, middle class, Midwestern, American heterosexual guy. Hell, give me a beer and a cigar and a big leather chair and dead animal heads on my walls. But, if spending so much time with them makes me some kind of a pseudo-adolecent or a neo-metrosexual or something, I guess that's the price I have to pay.

Click here if you're a decent dad who wants to make a difference in hid daughter's life:

Men Against Violence and Sexism: 10 things any dad can do