Fathers and Daughters

  Fathers and Daughters    

      I know many cases where there seems to be a special relationship between daughters and their fathers (as contrasted with their relationship with their mothers).  Whose hand does a daughter want to hold? Whose attention does she want to catch? It may be that I exaggerate the number by noticing them, and that it is my problem (as it were); but I think I am detecting a tendency, a natural bias in the female child towards the male parent. 

     I have gone on to wonder whether this tendency is innate, a hardwired sexual orientation, even in a very young child. Or, whether the relationship builds up by itself over the first 2 to 3 years of a girl's life, resulting from her interactions with her two parents. Perhaps she turns to her mother for food and security but to her father for his approval. It seems to be highly likely that the two parents will respond differently to demands; mother with a sigh or a cuddle; father, flattered into an attitude of heightened interest.

     Here is a case in point. A couple with an eight-year-old daughter came into the pub, the girl in front, the man at the rear, wearing a slightly odd sunhat (perhaps of leather).

      "Dad, what would you like?, asked the girl. "Dad. Dad, what would you like?" She was on the edge of sounding precocious; as though she was going the buy the round. But her parents ignored her. They bought drinks and settled on the table next to mine, the parents on opposite sides, the girl floating.

      "Dad, you are my best friend." 

Whereupon the father (continuing his exposition):     

      "It just needs enough of the high energy particles coming from the sun to be bent by the earth's magnetic field by just the right amount ."

      " I have never seen the aurora borealis", said mum. 

      "Nor have I ever seen it" admitted dad. He put his hat on his daughter's head just in time for the European barman to say "That's a nice hat!"

      "Daddy".

      "Georgina must have known if they really were living together" said mum.

      "Daddy".

      " Yes?"

      "Hmmmm," all of a sudden she had forgotten what she wanted to say.

      "I don't think they would go that far" continued the mum, at which point the girl went round and snuggled up to her, and received a reflex cuddle. 

  

     It was very different as I approached the bus stop four hours later. A seven-year-old boy, shouting over his shoulder at a thirty-something-year-old man who was rather grimly pursuing the boy down the tow-path: "Get away from me. Get away from me. I know what you are going to do, you bully." This carried on in front of quite a crowd of waiting passengers. The boy seemed considerably 'het-up', but not so distracted as to miss the opportunity of playing to his audience. 

     However, I was worried and felt that I ought to do something. I converged on the man as we both walked after the boy; spoke a few soothing words and urged him not to go too far. I think I must have pitched it about right, as he did not shout at me to mind my own business; but carried on round a corner. He came back a minute later, with the boy, having established (it would seem) a temporary truce. 

     Daughters and sons! Two adjacent episodes, at random, but head-to-tail as though deliberately pointing the contrast.

  Darwin, Freud, or Lorenz/Tinbergen imprinting? Or all of these schools?

(See also "Kicking" (https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2023/05/kicking.html))

The Pebble-Sellers

I rounded the corner from Main Road into the deserted Bull Baulk. It was mid-afternoon on one of the hottest days in the year. I could see a couple of children on the pavement some 50 yards away. At a guess, a boy of 7 and a girl of 5. As I got nearer I could see that the boy was holding up a sign; well, a piece of cardboard on which he had written the word "Please". 

I wondered if they had something they hoped they could sell me; home-made scones perhaps, or books they no longer needed. Sure enough! On a nearly empty tray they had 4 or 5 pebbles each of which, as  they pointed out, had been 'decorated' with a black felt-tip marker. 

"Fifty pence each" said the little girl. "We have sold all those already". She gestured to the tray's emptiness.

Fifty pence seemed quite a high price to my ancient brain, but my eye was taken by a smooth, flattened, stone on which one or other, the boy or the girl, had written in uneven black letters: 

Have

a

Good

Day

I picked it up. It fitted snugly in the palm of my hand. It felt nice. The sentiment seemed genuine. A wave of generosity welled up inside me and I decided I would buy. The girl jumped a little two-footed jump of excitement. But "Oh!" I had no money; only my Debit Card. 

"Never mind" I said, "It is not too far to my house. I shall come back in a quarter of an hour and if you are still here and it is still for sale I shall buy it then. But why don't you wait in the shade." For the sun was still hot at four in the afternoon. 

Indeed, it was a stiflingly hot day, in spite of two ferocious claps of thunder. The first had startled me into rushing out to the street to see if a crane had fallen off a low-loader; the second a synchronous flash-bang exploded right in my face. But little rain had fallen. 

My cool, well-curtained, house welcomed me in from the heat. Fortunately I found a fifty-pence piece. I also picked from my own collection of pebbles a small piece of mid-jurassic limestone for I though the children might enjoy the 180-million-year-old fossils. "Older than the dinosaurs" my little grand-daughter had told her astonished schoolmates in Brookline, Massachusetts. And out I went again, into the heat.

My two little pebble-sellers were still there, still out in the sun. They were delighted with my coin which they put in a small box, already containing two others. And I gave them my lump of fossilised shell-fish, explaining its age. "Gosh! Older than me!" said the boy. 

Back home I put my little 'wishing-stone' in the pebble bowl on the kitchen windowsill. I felt pleased with my purchase. It smiled back at me: "Have a Good Day".