My daughter hates me

But she loves my alter egos

Based on the four emails I received, my “On Being Dull” essay was my most controversial.

Multiple people asked me if I was “okay.” They observed how I had “nothing positive to say” about my life. Relatives politely suggested that I might need to get “help.”

The gist of the essay was that parenting was so repetitious and time-consuming that I had no time to cultivate the interesting parts of me. Because I had little time to read, write, or watch, I’d never felt so dull.

My wife read the essay and pointed out to me that, as a father, I was actually far from dull.

She’s right. Between adults, maybe I had nothing interesting to say, but with children I am lively and creative. Parenting can be a kind of nonstop improv class. When I’m with my daughter (now five), I’m often doing a stupid dance, or walking into a room with my butt uncovered (“that's disgusting daddy!”), or walking into a room with a straight face and silly hat on (her swimming suit). Or I'm bringing to life a cast of characters I’ve developed—whether it’s the compost monster, Ruff Ruff the dog, Daddy Robot, a spooky ghost (more on him later), or “Hooja,” who has been around from the beginning.

“Neurodiverse” would be the politically correct way to describe Hooja, who is an attic-dwelling hunchback inspired by Hodor from “Game of Thrones.” He’s large and oafish—a benign creep who shuffles around with limp hands, periodically slapping his face, never making eye contact with anybody. He’s only capable of saying his name, so he shuffles around muttering “Hoo, Hoo, Hooja” and performing every deed slavishly. Hooja is always bringing my daughter some ridiculous token—a bulb of garlic or an old pacifier he holds aloft in cupped palms, like a holy object, which he then inserts into my child’s bellybutton to hysterical laughter. I tell my daughter that Hooja lives up in the attic and that I feed him kitchen scraps. I'm sure half of her imaginative mind believes it.

Hooja is a caricature of myself. “Real me” is also a servant who gives, gives, gives and maybe gets, in return, a “Daddy, I don’t like you” or, worse, a slap to the temple. It’s not right to take any of my daughter’s ingratitude personally, so Hooja is me “squared”: so selfless that he has no desire except to serve. Unlike me, Hooja has made peace with his lowly role and has achieved a sort of everlasting Buddhist contentment.

I apply the principles of method acting to each of my characters, sometimes getting into character well before the interaction begins. Once, my wife caught sight of me, alone, behind a cracked bathroom door, hunchbacked, limply holding onto a toddler sock, as if it was dead mouse.

“What are you doing?!” she asked mirthfully.

“Hoo-jah,” I whispered.

Other times, I’ll cover myself in a white sheet, enclose myself in a dark room, and patiently wait for my daughter to open the door and catch sight of my ghoulish silhouette. Sometimes I’ve stood still for ten minutes, patiently awaiting her entry. When she enters, I neither move nor offer a childish “boo.” I merely stand there stiffly, allowing her to take in a deeper, darker horror, which usually ends with an ear-piercing scream.

I smile beneath my blanket. This is my “revenge character,” getting back at her for four years of ruined sleep.

These days, she rarely refers to me as “daddy.” She calls me “poop,” “pee,” or “bum.” When I walk her to school, she gathers her friends and they each take turns running up to me and punching my stomach. Sometimes they kick my shins. My daughter tells her mother that she loves her as much as “all the stars in the sky.” My daughter tells me she hates me every day.

I sometimes wonder if my parenting style has been too fun-loving, because in the moments when I must exercise authority, she either ignores me or feels crushed for having been cruelly flung from her carefree reality.

I’m the fun dad, but that doesn’t mean I’m the preferred parent. When she catches sight of me, at the end of her school day, she’ll sometimes cry. “Where’s mommy?” she asks. “I don’t want you!”

I take it all in, slavishly, like Hooja, doing my best not to feel the rejection, or the ingratitude. I remind myself that she's five and that she's in the midst of rehearsing social scenarios (the politics of exclusion) or trying out new words, like “hate.” I sense that there’s something probably natural about my daughter’s desire to bully someone much bigger than her. The ritual of controlling someone else may make it easier for her to bear the ultimate reality that she has very little control.

I tell myself these things — that I’m doing her a service — and 95% of the time I’m unbothered by the bullying, insults, and exclusion. But I’m not Hooja. The insults do mount up, and, out of nowhere I’ll want to scream, “Stop talking to me this way!” If I’m already feeling low, I’ll fantasize about filling a backpack and disappearing, as a ceremonial protest to prove that I am indeed necessary.

When my daughter was younger, random strangers would often compliment me on my patience. They'd see how slowly my daughter dawdled on a sidewalk path or how she sometimes just laid in the middle of it. The strangers were complimenting me on my minute-to-minute patience, but a dedicated parent knows that minutes, days, and months is not the best unit of measurement for one's patience. Some things — like a behavioral phase — take years.

You tell yourself the phase will pass, but two years later, it hasn’t. You find ways to deal with the dullness; you do things (disassociate) to dull the pain. You dissolve the person you once were to serve another human being. It’s probably best to just give in all the way and become a slavish and simpleminded Hooja, but most parents will find it hard to fully let their old selves dissolve. Patience is no longer a practice you think about; it’s an everyday way of being. You patiently wait for your daughter to become more considerate. You wait for personal peace and reconstitution, always wondering, always feeling guilty for wondering, if it’s right to pine for a different year.

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