My 11 year-old daughter, my late in life baby and only girl out of four, has her first school-run dance tonight.  I hope she will be able to hear the music over the whirring of the helicopter parents chaperoning said dance, but I know she will be safe in the community in which I feel a deep connection.

 Sadly, I am feeling the connection to the impending reality of her disconnecting from me more as she nears her teenage years.  She's already less inclined to snuggle up on the couch with me.  The number of times she replies back to my saying I love you starts to dwindle.  Her body begins to show signs of maturing making it more uncomfortable for me to just go up and give her a hug. 

 And she will be with me tonight to get ready for the big dance before I head off to the high school to watch the youngest of her three older brothers play football.  I will be texting comments during the game for my son to read in the locker room afterwards while worrying I might get a text from her to get her early from the dance.  It's a new school and a new town, so the paternal worry is her feeling awkward and alone in this new social setting in a new community to boot.

 My parental helicopter blades will be whirring full bore on the sidelines with my mind split between thinking of her and watching my son hoping he does not get walloped by a blind side hit on a developing team he quarterbacks given he fractured a vertebra in his back two years ago.

Tonight is likely an indelible memory for her, and I worry about how well I am equipped as the male parent to facilitate and enhance her experience.  I flat out suck at fixing her hair.  It was the source of a column about my parental ineptitude when she was a preschooler.  It took me literally two years to figure out those elastic figure eights with the marble thingies that serve as hair clips.  I remember one heroic effort of mine to style her hair that had her sob into the mirror when she looked at it, saying, "They are all going to a laugh at me, dad."

My only success was selling her on the benefits of the "Pebbles look" I recalled from The Flintstones.  Little did I know the preschool providers used to take it out and redo it for her once I had dropped her off.  She confessed this to me about a year ago when I asked her if she wanted me to brush her hair.  Try as I might not to tug out the snarls by holding her hair between brush and scalp as a child, she recoils in terror any time I offer to brush it like a veteran having a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder flashback to unhappier times.  I always suggest it, as if I am offering for her rather than for me.  

The answer always remains the same: "No way, Dad."

And so I am connecting to the reality of this natural disconnection.  Hopefully the connection we have is strong enough for her to see through my expected stumbling and bumbling as I try to smack the champagne bottle across the flesh vessel her mother and I have worked hard to help build and launch into the roiling waters of adolescence.

And may my helicopter blades make nary a whir.  Instead I will try to race along the dock and jump into the tug boat in the event there's a call for help in the seas that lay ahead where the gentle nudge of this worn, parental tug boat will try, to the best of its abilities, to help guide her and to protect her from life's shoals.

 And I will focus hard on feeling the joy of watching her experience this from further away than I would like rather than over my sense of loss at this natural and necessary disconnection from me.

Tug boats stay in the harbor for guidance into that safe place when sought.