Who's The Daddy: Our daughters, their strengths and one proud parent
Remember when you were at school and teachers told you to work on your weaknesses (maths usually)? Yeah, like most things we were taught there, that’s fundamentally useless in the real world too.
Always, always work on your strengths, because everyone’s really good at something. And it’s been proved right by our two grown-and-flown daughters this week.
Daughter #2 has only got a few weeks to go on her second tour of duty, entertaining kids on literally the world’s biggest cruise ship, and last week she did something that to a cynical introvert like yours truly is the stuff of actual nightmares, but to our youngest is just another day at work.
Here goes. We got a message from Daughter #2 on the family WhatsApp chat at 1.34am, so just after 8.30pm in the sun-kissed Caribbean, which read: “I just hosted the father and daughter dance for 200-plus fathers and daughters - in formal wear and heels - and then danced line dances with them for two hours in the same outfit.”
Usually at this point in my stress dream all my teeth fall out and I turn up for work naked. Full disclosure, I’ve been having that one a lot over the past few weeks.
Daughter #2 has many strengths. She’s brilliant at what she does and has this incredible ability to get along with people in a work situation. An ideal young woman to work with passengers and their kids on a cruise ship then. See, work on your strengths, not on quadratic equations, nobody gives two hoots about those.
By contrast, yours truly can, and has, started a fight in an empty house because an annoying fly has buzzed its way into the room at the precise moment a killer headline I’d just dreamt up burst by a character.
The only downside to Daughter #2 working for a US company and being surrounded by thousands of American tourists all day every day is that she’s started to talk with the slightest of twangs in her accent, which takes a little getting used to.
I suppose it’s like South American footballers who sign for Newcastle United who, by their first Christmas in the North East, sound like Oz from Auf Weidersehen, Pet. Paul Whitehouse absolutely nailed this phenomenon about 30 years ago with his Julio Geordio character.
Not to be outdone, Daughter #1, freshly returned from a long weekend at Glastonbury where she walked 30,000 steps a day and watched tons of acts I’ve never even heard of, learned she’d passed an important module on her Grown-up Girl Job training.
She WhatsApped us to say: “It was maths and data based, which isn’t my strong point.”
That’s why, in a year or two, you employ people whose strong point is maths and data.
Anyway, by of celebration, she’s currently in Barcelona for a week with The Boyfriend. All work and no play and all that.
Not to be outdone, Daughter #2 messaged a grinning pic of herself holding a giant glass of something cherry red and very nice all the way from a bar in Mexico. That’s the thing about raising strong and independent girls, they grow up and go off to do strong and independent things.
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