It’s prom, and my daughter is trying on adulthood

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It’s prom, and my daughter is trying on adulthood

My daughter has become the person she hoped she would be at age seven. We should all be so lucky.

“When I was seven, I had a vision of my junior year in high school,” she said. “I wanted a car, a boyfriend and a nice dress for the prom.”

Indeed, now that she is 16, these things have come to pass. She is on her second car, her second boyfriend and her 600th dress, though 593 of those were purchased by her grandma Peakie before she had reached the age of four. She had more dresses than there were days in the week (or in the year) to wear them.

But none of them looked like her prom dress, which when I first saw it gave me that feeling you get when you fall out of a hot air balloon floating over the Smokies, or when you get shot point blank with both barrels of a 12-gauge shotgun. The dress was purple, beautiful, sheer. It was purple and sheer. It was sheer.

I believe my first words upon seeing it were, “Over my dead body.” Something like that.

“Come on, it’s gorgeous,” my wife said.

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“Have you noticed that you can see through it?” I asked. “Does it come with a jacket, or some other form of exotic wrapping?”

“You’re just old,” she said.

“Guys who are not old will also be able to see through it,” I said.

Much later — after-the-prom-was-over later — my wife admitted that she had worriedly scanned the school’s dress code policy online to see if there was any danger of our daughter not getting in the door wearing her gorgeous, diaphanous purple dress. I told her she’d be lucky not to get arrested before she got to the prom.

“The weeks leading up to the prom” began right after Christmas, though I suspect my daughter and her mother had been plotting well before that. By the time March rolled around, our home had become what could best be described as “prom-centric,” with every available minute of every day crammed with prom-talk, prom-strategies, and prom-planning. I doubt this much attention was given to the Prince Charles/Lady Diana wedding. If you can imagine a cross between planning a royal wedding and a perpetual slumber party, that’s what our home has been like for the past several months.

“Where are you going?”

“To look at SHOES! Hello?”

“Hey, what are you all looking at on the laptop?”

“Nail designs! What do you think?”

“Who are you calling?”

“Hair appointment!”

In every conversation, a couple of points were made abundantly clear to me. One, I didn’t get it, couldn’t get and would never get it due to the double whammy of my gender and my age. And two, how could I possibly not get it? It’s like the freaking prom, doofus. This was the clear implication of every conversation for several months.

Finally, on Saturday, the big day arrived.

My daughter is richly blessed with an amazing group of friends, some of those friendships stretching all the way back to kindergarten. The “friend group” gathered on the afternoon of the prom at Lake Junaluska, all of them in their prom dresses and tuxes, and then posed for a truly dizzying array of photos among startled geese and curious bass fisherman and kayak photo bombers gliding through the placid waters of the lake for a closer look at the fashion show on the shore.

Excitable moms posed them this way and that, some giddy, some watery-eyed, some haunted by the ghosts of proms past, as a sad platoon of dazed fathers looked on helplessly from the shadows of the church chapel. The war to keep our daughters from transforming into young women too quickly had been lost. It should take so, so much longer than it does for any child to get from age four to age 16, but especially our daughters.

We’d keep them right here safe with us for a little while longer if we could, because we still see them as seven, asking us for two scoops of ice cream instead of one, or as four, begging us to read “Green Eggs and Ham” just one more time because the first three times was not quite enough.

But no, here they are at Lake Junaluska in their formal wear, and I see immediately that I had nothing whatsoever to fear over my daughter’s dress. There are almost as many scandalous dresses as there are geese. The juxtaposition of the natural beauty of the lake that seems as old as time itself with the sparkle and glamour of these freshly-minted beauties, who are trying on adulthood as surely as they are wearing these dazzling clothes, was stunning in every sense of the word.

In just a few minutes, they were going to pile into their Toyota Camrys and Honda Civics and drive themselves to dinner, and then the prom, and a few minutes later, they will be driving off to college or some other form of adulthood from which we — their parents — are in some fundamental way barred for good.

We don’t rush back to our cars after the photo shoot. We linger a few minutes, holding on while we can to what we can. There’s a beautiful sunset coming later on, but maybe tonight it is just too much beauty for us to bear.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

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