January 29, 2015
I’m not sure if other husbands share my problem but, occasionally, what my wife says doesn’t register with me right away. I want to chalk it up to being busy or thinking about other things, but, in reality, I think I just may be a little slow.
Of course, I’ll admit that my wife has a way of not conveying the true impact of certain things by just dropping them in a conversation in such a way that they seem almost irrelevant. Generally, later, when I’m driving down the highway, the true importance will dawn on me.
Usually her tidbits have to do with a bull report or some industry trend she’s noticing, but the latest was about my daughter. I’m not blind; I’ve seen my little girl grow up. In those rare moments when a dad is truly rational when it comes to his daughter I can say I’m very proud of the young lady she’s becoming.
However, somebody forgot to tell me how fast my little girl is transforming into a young lady. My only excuse is that I thought girls were supposed to start slamming doors and screaming “I hate you” as a warning that things were changing. Of course, those days may yet be ahead of me, but that’s how I explain being so clueless.
So, I’m driving down the road when it dawns on me that my wife had casually mentioned something about my daughter having a date, and I’m not talking about one on a calendar. Once the full realization hit me, I found myself thinking of ways to put the fear of God in this young man who had the temerity to ask out my daughter. For some reason, I now have a strong urge to start lifting weights, an idea I haven’t seriously entertained since college.
I want to be angry, but my being unaware of this evolving situation is my own fault. In hindsight, there were quite a few utterances whose significance I failed to grasp. So I’m adopting a new strategy: after every phone call, conversation, or text I receive, I’m going to ask myself, “Okay, what did they really say?”
It isn’t like I can’t learn from my mistakes. And to anyone who I previously failed in this regard, I want to say that it isn’t that I wasn’t listening, but simply that I didn’t really hear you.
The opinions of Troy Marshall are not necessarily those of beefmagazine.com and the Penton Agriculture Group.
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