Pay Attention to Me, Daddy

Little girls are special. Mine has a particular kind of magic about her — the way she moves through a room, the way she pulls people in without quite trying, the way she makes whatever she’s doing feel like the most important thing happening in that moment. She is the oldest of my three — nine years old, nearly ten, and currently in possession of a personality that arrived mostly assembled and has been expanding ever since. A strong cord of what makes up her mother exists but in many ways she is her own blessing. She is the kid who coordinates her brothers and whoever else is available into elaborate performances with assigned roles and a loose script nobody follows except her. She loves to be on display. Has always loved it. From the time she could string a sentence together she has been drawn to the moment when all eyes are on her — not out of vanity, just out of some deep-wired need to share whatever she’s feeling or doing or becoming with the people she loves most. She lives, she laughs, and she is genuinely one of the happiest people I know.

She turns ten next month. I keep saying that to myself like if I say it enough times it’ll stop being true.

She has been in gymnastics since she was six. Recreational at first, then last October she moved to the competitive team — two and a half hours, twice a week, the same rotation of floor, vault, bars, beam, and conditioning that she has now done enough times to do half of it in her sleep. She has an amazing group of girls around her. The kind of team that goes through the grind together long enough that they stop being teammates and start being something closer than that.

Most days I take her. Just the two of us.

The drive is ten minutes each way. No brothers, no shared agenda, no competition for airtime. It is usually gymnastics that fills it — where we are going or where we have just been — but not always. We have covered her birthday party plans in serious detail, the intricate politics of her friend group, what her teacher did that day, what her brothers did that irritated her. It is an open book, whatever is on her mind at that particular moment, and she lights up knowing it belongs to her. She doesn’t have to share it with anyone. That part matters to her as much as anything.

Sometimes I’ll run a quick errand or two after dropping her off — a Costco run, whatever needs doing — but I generally try and make it back for the second half of practice and find my regular spot on the observation mezzanine. Other parents are up there, moms and dads both, and we talk the way adults talk when they’re parked somewhere together for a couple of hours. She knows where I sit. She has known since October.

When She Tells Me to Pay Attention

At some point in every practice, she finds me.

Two fingers pointing at her eyes, then turned back toward me. Pay attention. Watch this. She does it before a skill she’s been working on, before a floor pass she’s proud of, sometimes just because she glanced up and caught me mid-conversation and apparently that needed correcting. The signal is the same every time. I have never once missed what she meant by it.

She does the same thing at home. Four back flips in a row on the trampoline in the backyard, and before the third one she stops, finds me wherever I am, and delivers the same two-finger redirect. Pay attention to me, Daddy. Watch this one. This is the one I want you to see. It isn’t a demand. It’s more like a standing assumption — that I’m there, that I’m watching, that I already understand this matters to her.

She loves to be on display. It is one of the things most native to her, and I say that not as a criticism but as one of the qualities I find genuinely wonderful about who she is. She wants to share herself — her progress, her effort, the thing she just figured out how to do — with the people she loves. And right now, in the gym, at nine going on ten, the person she most wants in the audience is me.

My dad was in that seat for me. Different sport, different building, but the same mezzanine in every way that mattered. He made every game — I mean every game. He never complained about it, never suggested there was somewhere else he’d rather be. When I got older and the competition got harder and opinions got louder, he was the relentlessly positive voice in the room — sometimes to the point where I had to quietly factor in that he was my father before I factored in his assessment. But that unconditional presence meant something I couldn’t have articulated at the time and have thought about considerably more from this side of it.

In nearly every corner of our daughter’s life, my wife is a relentless cheerleader. The concerts, the theater performances, the girl events — she is all in, every time, without being asked. But sports were not part of her world growing up, and there is a particular frequency that gets transmitted in those spaces that she doesn’t quite tune to. My daughter senses this. And somewhere in the last year it became clear that gymnastics was mine — my lane, my history, my ability to sit in that mezzanine and actually be interested rather than just present. The distinction is not lost on a nine year old who has been reading rooms since she could walk.

She is nearly ten. At twelve, most kids are well into their own orbit. The team starts to replace the parent in certain rooms. The ten minute car ride becomes a silence with headphones in it. I know this is coming. She won’t always do this — the two-finger redirect, the standing assumption that I’m watching. That belongs to right now, to this specific version of her, this age, this window where I am still the person she most wants in the audience.

Every kid wants their dad’s attention. She wants it just a little more than most, and she has always been that way — a little more wired for the shared moment, a little more lit up by the knowledge that someone she loves is paying attention. It is one of the best things about her. And it is what keeps me on that mezzanine.

She’ll get older. She’ll want other things from other people. You build her into something capable of not needing you and then you watch her go. I know that. I have made my peace with it in the abstract.

But she’s not there yet.

Pay attention to me, Daddy.

I will, my girl. I promise.