My mother did do something like that. She said, "Just ignore your father."
Is that what you had in mind?
No. What I have in mind is more along the lines of what Corri is doing, finding confidence in her womanhood. You can keep everything covered up and taboo, or you can take pride in the fact that you are a woman and consider a man’s teasing as if it were some kind of “jealousy.” I think Blackfoot mentioned to GGB or someone that he should not be ashamed because he is a horny male. Take pride in his maleness and don’t let some woman shame him into meeting her standards. That is what Corri is doing. That is what you are not getting Mrs.CAC4.
This is the last post I am going to write about this.
Corri is a WOMAN finding confidence in her womanhood. I am a WOMAN finding confidence in my womanhood. That should be obvious to anyone reading my thread.
When those things were said to me I was a 10 year old girl. The man who said those things to me wasn't "a man" -- he was my f*cking FATHER! He was not my peer.
What happened to me when I was a child was completely about my father, not about me. I had no role in it. I was an innocent child whose childhood was terribly damaged by the careless words of someone who should have been protecting me instead of hurting me.
Mrs...I get what you are saying...I can clearly see where your father crossed the line of father to daughter....
I don't think it is appropriate to tease a young girl about her becoming a woman...it isn't appropriate from anyone of the opposite sex....peer or adult...it is not appropriate for a mother to tease a girl about that or her son about his becomming a man....that is just NOT RIGHT...
I might have a little more sensitivity to this because my H and his siblings were victims of severe sexual abuse...when his father was around in his old age I was extremely cautious about how he interacted with my little girls....I NEVER let him have him on his lap....it is sad but he was not the only abuser in that family...and now my H is for the first time dealing with the horrors of his young life....
Cobra: I am talking about teasing sort of comments that one girl might say to another but for some reason are considered inappropriate for a parent. To me, these types of comments could set up a guilt complex in a girl or they could not.
Mrs. cac: First off, girls don't typically tease each other the way boys do. They form cliques, they talk about each other, they try to out-dress each other. Apparently you have no clue how adolescent girls behave.
Mrs. cac, I had exactly the same response as you did when I read cobra's comment: girls don't tease each other the way boys do.
Cobra, you do not know how adolescent girls relate to each other and I also think you do not know how mothers and daughters relate to each other.
What I meant when I said that my mother's response was "ignore your father," was the following:
You suggested that any harm done by a father teasing her adolescent daughter about her budding sexuality might be mitigated ("balanced," I believe, was your word) by appropriate coaching by a strong mother. You suggested the mother coaching the daughter was a parallel with the way a father might coach a son in how to treat a woman.
There is no parallel.
When my father teased me, my mother would say, "just ignore him."
In your fantasy, what should my hypothetically strong mother have said to turn this potentially damagaging comment by my father into something good for me? How should she have "balanced" him?
Yeah, a mother should protect her daughter, as Mrs. cac said, by telling the father/brother/uncle to cut it out. But I'm guessing my mother's response might be typical: "just ignore him."
I was talking about fathers teasing young daughters inappropriately. What on earth this has to do with Corri's journey as an adult is beyond me.
If your father made strong sexual comments, I agree that is inappropriate, I already said that. But teasing on a level like kids would do just does not seem that damaging to me, unless there is a lot of insecurity going on, which there obviously was. I believe that for girls, building a sense of security is more dependent on a strong mother than a father. Sure you had nothing to do with your father’s comments. Yes, you were a child and a victim. When did I ever say you were responsible? I said your mother had a role to play in giving you the strength to overcome these types of things, not to mention protecting you in the first place, if protection was truly called for. The kind of thing I had in mind for your mother to say would be along the lines of “Well, your father’s just jealous because he doesn’t have boobs, and yours are going to be gorgeous, so be proud of them.” This is where I was trying to draw in the Corri analogy.
I do know how girls and mothers relate to one another. It is all about being vulnerable to one another. Men and boys don’t relate like that, but they are taught from an early age to respect the feelings of girls. All I am saying is that girls could be taught to understand the way boys relate and understand that teasing from boys and men does not mean they think the girl is bad, deformed, or anything of the sort, but that is just how males dance around their discomfort of being vulnerable. They aren’t used to it.
MrsCAC4, I don’t know your father and maybe he is a mean, vindictive SOB, but if he wasn’t and he actually cared for you, his teasing may have been the only way he knew at the time to engage with females. You guys are way too hung up on the superiority of your feelings. Try to understand things a little more form the male POV (and I am not including male sexual harassment).
he actually cared for you, his teasing may have been the only way he knew at the time to engage with females
I think mrs cac and I have both already said that we understand that our fathers did not know any better and-- at least from my pov-- there was no malice or harm intended from my father. I know that as a 58-year old. I didn't know that as an 11-year old. The fact remains that I didn't feel safe with him. I didn't like spending time alone with him and I rarely did. My mother's way of protecting me and giving me tools to cope with him was to say: "ignore your father."
For a mother to say to her daughter in response to a father's teasing, "“Well, your father’s just jealous because he doesn’t have boobs, and yours are going to be gorgeous, so be proud of them” is yukky on many levels IMHO.
I can't imagine my bf ever making any teasing remarks about his daughters' bodies (and at age 17, they were both 34DD). But I can picture his ex-W making a remark like the one you suggested... and I still think it's yukky.
I'd be interested in Mojo's comments om this discussion because she had a very good relationship with her father and not so good a relationship with her mother. Mojo, did your dad tease you about your budding sexuality? Can you picture a father doing that in a way that would still feel okay and safe to a girl?
cobra, how can you know how a mother and daughter relate to each other when they're alone? Are you hiding in the closet?
Why? What makes it yukky? Is it some sense of shame of your body? Why is that? What if your mom said something like your dad is jealous of your cute figure cause he doesn’t have one? I’ve actually heard women remark of other women/girls figures and that seems ok. Why isn’t that yukky?
I think the thing required for a girl to not be bothered with such remarks is to have grown up understanding and being a part of the type of teasing boys do. For a girl to just walk into that with little previous exposure would be a problem. But that has a lot to do with their social conditioning, which comes back to both the father and the mother.
OK, I don’t know what my wife and daughters say in private. But I do hear them around the house. If they are having one kind of talk between them and another kind around me, then there is a problem, IMO.
I used to work on him to take exercise, give up smoking etc. but nothing doing. One of my girlfriends told me off once for letting him get away with it, little did she understand the futility of trying to nag him. His dad had a heart attack about 10 years ago - it just didn't seem to touch him at all he didn't modify his behaviour one jot. When our son was born I begged him for DS sake to take better care of himself - nothing.
It's hard to know what to do in a sitch like yours. I'm not sure what the climate is between you two these days.
The climate improved after our trip to Paris, we had a great time it was romantic, we ML, we stood under the Arc de Triomphe (scene of a romantic assignation between us 18 years ago) and professed our love for each other. We came back on a high for a while things were much better. I'm afraid I am partly (maybe mostly) to blame for the current reverse back to conflict-free distance. What I noticed almost immediately was something I noticed a couple of years ago when things were going well between us - namely a feeling that I'd gone for gold and got the bronze. Mojo's new found solo status has me somewhat envious, they've finally admitted they are not right for each other and they are still friends about it. I wish we could do the same. I have sometimes brought this up but somehow he manages to turn the romance up to full power and warm me up so that I feel like I must be crazy to think we're over. It's not that we're over it's just that somehow we never quite were.
I am going to be very open here and admit something - sometimes I wish he WOULD die. I guess it's a little similar to Choc dreaming he was choking his W.
Why would I wish such a thing? It would take away the problem of trying to work on this R, and it would take away the problem of letting him down and of telling him the truth about how I feel.
I absolutely do know that I am wrong in fantasising this, not just morally wrong, but wrong to believe it would be any kind of solution. What it really is is a wish to press rewind, go back 10 or so years and split up then before there were kids involved.
No I don't go to alanon. The two nights a week I get to myself I go singing or I go to the gym, maybe I should drop the singing for a little while but I'd rather not.
Fran
if we can be sufficient to ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs Erica Jong
I wouldn't call the way my father was toward me abusive, but it was teasing and icky. It was NOT healthy, I'm sure of that.
Just to offer a bit of compare and contrast from super-HD girl. I always had a good relationship with my father. Here's the kind of comments I can remember him making about my blossoming sexuality. My sister and I were all dressed up teen sexy to go to the roller rink on a Saturday night. My Dad looked up from his paper and said with a sort of sad bafflement "What happened to my little girls?" but then he smiled like it was okay that we were growing up. Another incident: When I was 13 (looked 19) I was in my bikini at a big pool party thrown by my Dad's huge gang of Irish cousins. A college-aged guy came up and started chatting with me. My Dad yelled "She's 13" from across the pool and everybody started laughing in a way that made me feel sort of proud rather than embarassed. Of course, the college-aged guy was kind of embarassed.-LOL. I remember this incident clearly as a sort of rite of passage out of girlhood because it was also the first day I used a tampon (because I really wanted to wear the bikini-LOL) which was sort of a painful breaking of the hymen type experience.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
Also, my father did try to censor my reading materials a bit when I was young. I can remember him throwing away a copy of "Valley of the Dolls" that I was reading. (Being Mojo, I of course fished it out later on the down low) but after a while he kind of accepted the fact that I was mature enough to handle reading stuff like that. We both really liked reading Raymond Chandler, Ross Thomas, John D. MacDonald, Robert Parker and those books had quite a bit of sex in them. Of course, he also introduced me to P.G. Wodehouse and NPR and a lot of his philosophy of life about things like politics and economics etc. My father came from a large rowdy Irish clan on his mother's side but on his father's side he came from a long line of Unitarian lawyers, inventors, town founders, hermits, writers that goes back to the second voyage of the Mayflower (Mojo could join the Mayflower Society- can you imagine?-LOL). Part of the reason I had the argument with my H about not wanting to buy new shoes is that my father taught me that it's wrong to spend money on stuff like shiny new shoes if you don't have your financial situation firmly in hand otherwise because to some extent capital = liberty and it's better to be a free person in shabby shoes than a slave in shiny shoes. Sorry, I digress. The point I am trying to make is that IMO at some point in the relationship between a father and a daughter the best option becomes doing your best to become a sort of friend/mentor.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
