It's long, but read it anyway...please.

A girl's father is the first man in her life, and probably the most influential. –David Jeremiah

A boy, by the age of three years, senses that his destiny is to be a man, so he watches his father.—Some Researcher…can’t remember his name…Google it

A co-worker who I greatly admire has these two quotes posted on the wall above his desk. They serve as subtle reminders to himself of his responsibilities as a father and each time I read them, they do the same for me.

While I am very concerned for the well being of my little girl—who by all indications will grow up to be a beautiful “princess” who turns plenty of heads and breaks her share of hearts—it’s not her I worry about so much; it’s the boys who’ll ride up to her on their black horses disguised as white. Zane falls into this category as I know one day he will cross paths with the daughter of some other poor father who shares the same fears that I do. That is why I try to do the best I can to make sure his horse will need no white coloring.

The beginning of these fears reared their head the other day when I was out with Cambrie. We were in a store when she stopped dead in her tracks, looked at me and said, “Daddy, I need to go potty.” So I did what I normally do; curse the fact that I have to enter a public restroom and then actually use the germ incubator called a toilet. The way I see it, sitting on a public toilet is like sitting down in your favorite chair and wiggling your rear end a little to get comfortable except that your “chair” is a Petri dish containing the filth of humanity. It doesn’t matter how many times you wipe the seat or how many layers of toilet paper you put around the porcelain; it’s still like rolling around in a dumpster. To make matters worse, me being of the male gender naturally leads to use of the men’s restroom which means the petri dish is a science experiment from the 1700’s and has never been cleaned out. So, knowing that Cambrie and I would later need to burn off the entire outer layer of our respective skins to be clean, we walked the plank to the men’s restroom.

I took a deep breath—to both calm my nerves and provide a few more seconds of non-toxic air—as I pushed the door open. What happened next; well, a father somewhere wasn’t doing his duty. I held the door as Cambrie crossed the threshold and walked around the corner. When I came around the corner, Cambrie had stopped dead in her tracks again. Standing up against two urinals, were two pairs of little, white, bum cheeks staring back at us; their soaking pants and underwear sprawled around their ankles. I didn’t know quite what to say and from the look on Cambrie’s face, she didn’t know what questions to ask. We sat there and stared for a few seconds, both lost in our own thoughts; me, furious at the store for not having a “family” bathroom and Cambrie wondering why in the world these two boys were standing in the middle of the bathroom, naked.

Next, we rushed into a stall were Cambrie finished her business after I did my best to “clean” the toilet. As we walked out of the bathroom I said something like, “gee, those boys were kind of strange weren’t they?” Cambrie’s response: “They must need someone to teach them the right way to go potty. That was gross.”

Truer words have never been spoken and I felt sorry for the two little boys. I vowed right then and there that Zane would have plenty of practice standing up to pee before I ever let him go into a public restroom alone. You never know who’ll you meet in any given place at any given time, and like I mentioned earlier, it’s my duty to make sure he grows up learning all aspects of being a man; my duty to make sure his horse will be white.