It struck me as a bit strange that the new grandpa wasn’t quite as nuts about all this as his wife. Everybody is making all this fuss and he is calmly watching, I assume, enjoying his baby grandchild.
He had kissed his daughter, shook his son in law’s hand, been given a camera to take photos but had a look on his face that wasn’t quite that thrilling.
I felt that something was wrong in this scenario and couldn’t wait to get him alone for lunch to really find out where he was coming from.
We started with the usual vague compliments but he looked at me and said, “Don’t get me wrong but I am thrilled that my daughter now has a child of her own. It actually takes a burden off my mind. For 24 years my daughter has driven me nuts with her thinking, her teenaged moodiness, her telling me that I never understood her especially in her teens, when I felt that between her and my wife I was never right about anything. Then came the weird boyfriends that she was always falling in love with, who seemed to have come out of a vampire pit somewhere then my trying to teach her to drive which aged me a good 10 years. And her insisting that she learned how to drive inspite of me. I can go on and on, but any guy with a daughter knows what I’m talking about.”
He seemed to reflect for a minute and finally said, “I look at my daughter now and finally I can say to her, now you have a daughter, remember what I always told you that someday you’ll have a daughter and I’ll have my revenge.”
