The graduation speech I didn’t get to give

It was graduation weekend at my daughter’s school and so I hung out with emotional dads for a couple of days and at the graduation dance I got a little teary-eyed myself. It was the Father-Daughter dance and we shimmied and shook to “I Saw Her Standing There” and then a slow waltz to “Wonderful World” and I sang the words to her, “I hear babies cry, I watch them grow; they’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.” And I meant them.

The school is a boarding school for kids with learning differences and the day we left her there years ago was an agonizing day, walking away from a weeping child in the arms of a teacher, and driving down the road telling each other we were doing the right thing and not believing it. She didn’t change her clothes for four days because her mother had hugged her in those clothes and she wanted to remember.

And then it was Sunday and the bagpiper led them out of the gym and they stood on the green grass and on the count of three, they flung their mortarboards in the air. I took a picture and it shows my daughter’s cap flying higher than anyone else’s.

Fathers of daughters at graduation are stunned by the rush of memories, the transformation of child into woman in high heels, the urge of patriarchy to lock the child in a tower, and the sheer pride at observing her freewheeling independence and acuity. It’s a day when toxic masculinity seems to fall away from a man and he feels much older, a little unsteady, a man on the sidelines of the world she seems at home in.

I am married to a virtuous woman who recycles everything, even bottle caps and bubblegum wrappers, and regards a hamburger as a form of cannibalism, and reads aloud to me stories about injustice and human suffering, so my toxicity has been diminished by association. As a child, I was very close to my aunts, not to my uncles. The first characters in books that I deeply identified with were girls, Laura Ingalls and Anne Frank. My dad wasn’t a hunter, he was a gardener and a reader, and he had no interest in football. I never heard him curse. My daughter knew him when she was a toddler; he lay in bed, dying, and he played with her by wiggling his toe under the blanket and when she grabbed for it, he moved it away. She was delighted. Making her laugh was a last great pleasure for him.

The girls of the Class of 2019 struck me as quite sure of themselves and at the same time less judgmental than the girls of my day. Much less. Toxic femininity has not struck them, as it struck women my age: the poisons that beauty products put into the environment, the pesticides, carcinogens, plasticizers, formaldehyde, coal tars, petrolatum, that enable youthful skin and shiny hair. Whatever social pressure has produced this ridiculous $805 billion global industry, it mostly comes from women themselves and is delusional: I have never in my life heard a man comment critically on a woman’s skin tone. Men love women who are witty, observant, who will stand up to us when we are wrong, and yet love us.

Men use soap and water, we’re out for an outdoors look that goes back to Wild Bill Hickok and Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse did not use beauty products except for war paint now and then. He was a mystic and his religious certainty enabled him to ride into battle against George Custer, who was extremely vain about his appearance and led his men into disaster.

I don’t know a single man who uses facial cleanser. Nor any married man either. Even in the Information Age, we like to look weather-beaten, like sailors or sheepherders. We have a toxic president who pays far too much attention to his hair, but he’s very far from representative of the gender. I am no expert in gender studies, but my theory is that male toxicity faded in the 1950s when Little Richard sang falsetto on “Lucille” and then Pete Seeger on “Wimoweh,” and Brian Wilson and then the Beatles. At the Saturday dance, when the band sang “I’ll never dance with another,” all of us dads sang that high “Oooooo,” holding our daughters in our arms. That was a moment, let me tell you. It was as thrilling that night as it was in 1963. Try it yourself sometime, pal.

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