Greg Wright - Daddy Dates: Four Daughters, One Clueless Dad, and His Quest to Win Their Hearts: The Road Map for Any Dad to Raise a Strong and Confident Daughter

daddy dates

daddy dates

FOUR DAUGHTERS, ONE CLUELESS DAD,
AND HIS QUEST TO WIN THEIR HEARTS

Greg Wright

2011 by Greg Wright and Another Door Opens, L.L.C. f/s/o Diane Dee
Covey and Karin Maake Tochilovsky

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Represented by David Hale Smith, DHS Literary, Inc.

Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational,
business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please
e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wright, Greg, 1970
Daddy dates : four daughters, one clueless dad, and his quest to win their hearts / Greg Wright.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59555-320-1 (alk. paper)
1. Fathers and daughters. 2. Fatherhood. 3. Wright, Greg, 1970 I.
Title.
HQ755.85.W725 2011
306.874'2dc22

2010045900

Printed in the United States of America
11 12 13 14 15 QGF 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

L ets be honest. I am completely unqualified to write an advice book. Im just a guy in Austin, Texas, who woke up one day at age twenty-nine and realized four girls call me Daddy, and all I could think was, how did that happen?

And a nanosecond later, it hit me: Whatever you do, dont screw this up, dude.

Well, I can tell you why it happened. When I was about seventeen, I made a really, really, really strong wish for my life: Please, God, no matter what, I want to be surrounded by beautiful women.

Today I am. Their names are Victoria, Whitney, Hailee, and Madison, and they are 17, 16, 15, and 13 respectively. I share life with these beauties every day. Although the man of the house messes up on a regular basis, at least my parent passport has four stamps on it and the girls keep letting me into their amazing countries.

How that miracle happened is what this book is about. Im hardly Mr. Perfect TV Dad. I guess part of it was getting lucky in the gene pool lottery, but there is one strategy Ive stumbled upon that Ive shared with other dads, and it seems to be working for all of us.

A few years ago I had a paternal ah-ha! moment that changed our lives forever in ways that can been seen now we have a fantastic relationship, and theyre all doing well in their teen worldsbut hopefully even more later, when theyre parents. (If thats what any or all of them choose to do, of course.)

Right now my girls are doing a great job being good human beings. Im just incredibly lucky that I get a front row seat. Teachers and neighbors always use words like wellmannered, appreciative, creative, and happy, and so far, nobodys got a terminal case of metal face (yet). My hope is that my girls will, at the very least, turn out to be confident and productive adults who have reasonably good taste in partners, perhaps due (in part) to the way they were raised. Of course, the jurys still out on the long-term result, but giving the world four sane, loving women is what Dad is trying his best to contribute to the planet.

Not long ago a couple of friends said, You need to write a book! Yeah, right. Like Im qualified. But then I conducted a limited focus group at my house, and the girls said, Our friends wish their fathers would do this too. Go for it, Daddy.

And whenever I mention my strategy to other fathers during one of my seminars or while watching a ballgame or at church, its not uncommon for them to ask, How does it work, GregI mean, what do I have to do in order to have the same result? And I thought, I dont think this is quantum physics, but if you need help with a roadmap, sure. Im in.

And thats when I realized that maybe its my destiny to share a little idea that came to me as an inspiration one day in the woods... I'm pretty sure it was put in my head while He was having a gut laugh remembering my hormonal teen fantasy about how I wanted to live in the company of the lovely opposite sex.

1
The Tree and Me

I dont come from a family of girls. I have a couple of brothers and a sister, and then all of a sudden theres a wife and four daughters, and Im not even thirty yet.

I Heck, even the dog is female.

I never thought I was the type of guy to have kids, and honestly I probably wasnt the type of guy to get married either. My dad is a country boy at heart, and my mom had a passion for city life, so it came as no big surprise when things didnt work out.

As a young man I was very self-centered and more than a little arrogant. It was all about me, man. If they were giving out awards for being selfish, Big Tex wouldve had a hard time pinning a blue ribbon on my puffed up chest at the state fair, it was so big. Definitely.

But then I met my wife, fell in love, and we tied the knot on Valentines Day 1992. I was twenty-one years old. We were only a few months into marriage when my bride gave me a Hallmark card with little booties on it. Youd think that would trigger my comprehension of the big news, but nooooo. What an idiot. When I finally realized she was pregnant, I remember feeling this tiny bit of excitement buried under a mountain of yikes, now what?

Then came three more precious baby girlsbing, bang, boom. Theyre about as close together as you can get without having quadruplets.

That much estrogen was too much for me to reasonably understand, and I knew that I was in way over my head. When our littlest entered kindergarten, I had a very dramatic feeling that I was in danger of becoming a complete loser in the dad-of-big-girls department.

Frankly, that thought scared me to death because I knew that when it came to parenting, I was just shooting from the hip every day, and I wanted a solution. I wanted a plan. Now.

So I did what any reasonable male would do: I bailed. Not on my wife and kids, but to a mountaintop in Colorado. I thought some manly alone time would help me figure out how in the world I was going to handle my responsibilities. I was petrified that I was going to mess up the most important job Id ever have.

Thats when I found The Tree.

I plopped myself down under a big ole pine tree and decided to take a business approach to this problem of dad-being and girl-raising. I took a notepad out of my backpack and clicked the pen a few dozen times, as if revving the engines on the paternal horsepower ready to leap onto the page.

The truth was anything but. What was I going to do with these four female dependents who depend on me to be the Great Wise One? What do I know about womenof any age?

That was a nonstarter. I stuck the end of the pen in my mouth and tapped my teeth.

Okay, relax. I can figure this out. First, I need to set some goals. Yeah, thats it. But wait, Im missing real goals in my own life, my own career, and my own marriage. And maybe I ought to get my life together first, because thats what mature, responsible men do, right? No, forget about all of that, I just need to get more on track with my wife. Or maybe, I should probably create a solid ten-year plan for my business first so I can top off that college fund. And what about retirement, buddy, you havent even thought about