By Steve Brawner, © 2022 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

“Weddy, Daddy?”

That’s what a blue-eyed two-year-old girl was saying to me 18 years ago as we played in the floor together – “weddy” being her pronunciation of “ready.” Now, another blue-eyed two-year-old girl is saying the same thing.

The first is now a 20-year-old woman, and we have a second daughter who’s 17. Today’s two-year-old, Hope, was born Jan. 10, 2020, when her mother was 44 and her dad was a not-very-spry 50. 

Having a third daughter 15 years after the second has been an interesting experience. We are trying to enjoy it more while stressing less. We’d better, because that girl is into everything. I don’t know how the iPad is going to survive. 

As middle-aged parents of a young daughter, we are aware of the need to take care of ourselves. We want to be healthy and active as she grows up, starts her own adult life and eventually gives us grandchildren.

Unless she kills us first. A few months ago, I was working at my desk when the doorbell rang. The woman at the door asked me if that was my kid on the edge of the lawn. Horrified, I raced outside, scooped Hope up, and brought her back inside. The woman had driven by and had seen Hope walking along the street between ours and the neighbor’s house. When we weren’t watching, Hope had reached up and turned the doorknob, which we didn’t realize she was able to do, and decided to explore the world outside. 

That shriek you just heard came from a computer desk in Wynne where Grandma is learning of this for the first time. Mom, we now keep the deadbolt locked whenever Hope’s inside.

It is a bit of a strange thing when one of your daughters is part of a different generation than your other two. Our first daughter was born 10 days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The second was born three years and three days later.

Back in 2001, there were no iPhones or Facebook. A pandemic was something that had happened in 1918-19. The country had its longstanding divisions, but its internal politics wasn’t quite as ugly. After all, we had outside enemies, and we knew who they were: the ones who had flown planes into buildings.

Hope is growing up in a different place. The nation’s political divisions are more pronounced. Too many of us consider members of the other party to be the enemies within – even though we have a common enemy, a virus. Also, she has spent most of her first two years in a pandemic. While our first two babies might have been held by multiple adults at church and other gatherings, we’ve kept more distance and been more careful with Hope. It may or may not be a coincidence, but she’s somewhat shy around other people. Perhaps social scientists will one day study how children were affected by this environment.

Not all of the country’s recent changes are bad. When our first two daughters were born, few would have predicted that the very next president would be an African American man, or that the current vice president would be an African American woman. Regardless of what one thinks about their politics, this represents welcome progress, and it would have been almost unimaginable when I was born in 1969. As for the pandemic, it’s forced us all to rethink a lot of things, some of which should have been rethought a long time ago.

It can be scary to imagine the world Hope will inherit, but it will be her world and her time, and rightfully so. I’m from a different time, one that’s fading away. Someday she’ll walk out the door, past the neighbor’s house and to her adult life. Part of me will surely want to scoop her up again, bring her back inside, and lock the door forever. But I’ll have to let her go.

I guess I’d better get weddy for it.

Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 16 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.

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