Some boys were playing in the hallway: eleven, twelve years old, pushing one another around in a wheeled desk chair. Shirttails untucked, yelling, taunting, acting like idiots. Taking turns being the fortunate fool in the chair who goes careening down the linoleum and crashes into the wall and falls out and gets hurt and fakes like he’s okay. They were loud, unruly, locked in to the clatter of the wheels, the delighted scream of the idiot at the moment of impact, the collective enterprise of wasting time with a hint of violence. They were, I believe, happy.

Then my daughter entered the scene, passing from one doorway to another across and down the hall. She was twelve then, going on thirteen, tall, leggy, not exactly graceful—no dancer—but with a distinct air of confidence in her gait, of knowing where she was going and how to get there. I’m not sure she even noticed the boys and their chair, perhaps because the instant she entered the hallway, they all fell completely silent and stood there gaping at her, motionless, sagging like the fingers of an empty glove. They weren’t having fun anymore. She had kicked their power cord right out of the wall just by walking past.

Nobody ogled or leered at her. There was no Tex Avery business with extruded eyeballs or the unspooled flapping window shades of their tongues. Nothing unseemly or overtly sexual at all, just a bunch of boys standing around blinking as this girl sauntered by. And yet the moment, which I happened to catch sight of through a doorway, made me really uncomfortable. For a while everything about my daughter’s entrance into puberty, her emerging new self and the concomitant interest of boys in her, discomfited me. And the part of it that made me squirm the most was how depressingly trite my discomfort was.

I am not a prude. I like sex; I respect sex; I have enjoyed sex, not without interruptions, losing streaks, and dry spells, for almost thirty years. I don’t care to give sex any more credit than it deserves, nor do I necessarily prefer it at any given moment of the day to drugs, rock and roll, watching The Wire, or the sight of a paper packet filled with well-salted pommes frites still hissing with oil from the fryer. I like the dirtiness of sex, the smell of it, the measured violence and tenderness. I like thinking about sex. I don’t begrudge sex or its indisputable pleasures to anyone in any variation that consenting partners can safely attempt or devise—not even to my children, when the time comes and they are of age, well informed, and emotionally ready. My wife and I vaccinated our daughter early against the human papilloma virus, a gesture that encompassed or presaged or at least sought to face up to the nature and the dangers of her eventual life as a sexual being. I believe that sexual freedom is good for all women, including my daughters, and good therefore also for the men who may one day be their partners; that sexual hypocrisy and repression are inherently evil; and that the protective ministrations and censoriousness of fathers are at best harmful to daughters and at worst the mark of the same kind of deep human ickiness that brought us the story of Lot and his daughters. And yet there I was, scowling at those boys in the hallway, feeling an obscure and altogether clichéd urge to go after them with a large mallet, because I didn’t like them looking at my daughter that way—or any way at all.

Was that the kind of father I had turned out to be? Standing on the front porch with my shotgun under one arm, cartoonishly interrogating my daughters’ cartoonish dates as they sat with a boxed cartoon corsage covering their cartoon boners? Fumbling with a show of jocular pedantry or saggy would-be hipness through every “little chat” with her about menarche or masturbation?

How embarrassing! and above all, in my lamentable sense of embarrassment over the whole business! when the first box of junior-size tampons made its appearance in the house—a bit prematurely, as it turned out—and in spite of my having been raised by a frank 1970s-style mother who saw to it that I understood clearly the laws and equipment of menstruation, and my having lived intimately with women and their periods since I was not quite eighteen years old, I suffered the tritest fatherly panic imaginable.

“Do these fucking things come with instruction books?” I cried to my wife. “Oh my God, what if you die the day before she gets her period?”

“Relax,” my wife said, putting her arm around my shoulder and adopting a textbook condescending-yet-patient wife cartoon tone. “It’s very simple.”

I have no idea what she said after that, because I was too busy pretending to pretend that I understood. I am sure it is very simple indeed, though there is still and I suppose there will always be a fundamental mystery inherent in the word applicator that I will never fully grasp. But brassieres—I’m sorry. Cup size, wires, padding, straps, clasps, the little flowers between the cups: You need a degree, a spec sheet. You need breasts. I don’t know what you need to truly understand brassieres, and what’s more, I don’t want to know. I’m sorry. Go ask your mother.

There you have it: the most flagrant cliché imaginable. As I utter it, I might as well reach for a trout lure, a socket wrench, the switch on my model train transformer. This may be the fundamental truth of parenthood: No matter how enlightened or well prepared you are by theory, principle, and the imperative not to repeat the mistakes of your own parents, you are no better a father or mother than the set of your own limitations permits you to be. And that set is your heritage, the pinched and helpless legacy of all the limited mothers and fathers whose fumblings, evasions, and shortcomings led, by some dubious accidental magic, to the production of you. It turns out there are only nine different ways of being a father, and eight of them are distinguishable from one another only by trained experts from Switzerland, and the ninth is exactly like the others, only more so. Sooner or later, you will discover which kind of father you are, and at that moment you will, with perfect horror, recognize the type. You are the kind of father who fakes it, who yells, who measures his children with greatest accuracy only against one another, who evades the uncomfortable and glosses over the painful and pads the historic records of his sorrows and accomplishments alike. You are the kind who teases and deceives and toys with his children and subjects them to displays of rich and manifold sarcasm when—as is always the case—sarcasm is the last thing they need. You are the kind of father who pretends knowledge he doesn’t possess, and imposes information with implacable gratuitousness, and teaches lessons at the moment when none can be absorbed, and is right, and has always been right, and always will be right until the end of time, and never more than immediately after he has been wrong. And when your daughter’s body begins to betray her, and her sky flickers in the distance with the heat lightning of sex, you clear your throat and stroke your chin whiskers and tell her to go ask her mother. You can’t help it—you’re a walking cliché.