A little room for rhetoric: Now that my daughter is gone, I feel like I’m back in business as a parent!

When I talk to the dad I was a year ago, I’m talking to another fellow entirely. Honestly, I feel a little sorry for that guy.

That guy was running out of ideas. That guy was in charge of a child who seemingly wouldn’t listen to a word he said. That guy had lots of responsibility, and very little leverage.

This guy? Little day-to-day responsibility—but more leverage, somehow. A pleasant surprise.

It’s hard to have gravitas when the teenager sees you bickering with her mother, eats your uneven cooking and waits for you to get out of the bathroom. Hard to maintain moral authority when she came home last night and realized you were too tipsy to ascertain that she was, too. Hard to hold credibly forth on how to live, when she left for school in the morning and you were in your office working, and returned from soccer practice and you were in your office working, still. Familiarity breeds contempt, no man is a hero to his valet, and ethos needs a little air to breathe.

And now you do have some room to operate, and so does she. You have enough room to be curious about her life, and to listen, for long stretches, with real fascination. She has enough room to find herself in the middle of situations she knows you have not faced. “Dad,” she has said directly, “you have no idea what this is like ….” And by God, she’s been right.

And you have done that listening, have absorbed the wonder of someone you love that much being on an odyssey that grand. And she has taken pleasure in being the one doing all the talking, for once. So that when you do offer a word, it’s offered in a humbler spirit and received in a more welcome one. And usually, the word actually lands with a chirp of the tires, and a puff of smoke.

Her teammate tears her ACL, and I grieve for her and her parents on FaceTime—with my whole face—and later on text I say, “Take care of her best you can, Scout. And play like hell cuz you can.”

On the recent “revelations” about how elite women soccer players are treated by coaches—she thinks she wants to write a book about it someday and I tell her I’d love to help.

In response to a question about how to reduce hangovers, I confess to her from a position of rueful authority that there is no healthy secret to that.

After a random conversation, I write: “It’s fun to listen to your stories—and to tell them to other people. What an adventure.”

Before a game, I spend three minutes composing this: “Play like you DO!”

It’s not that I believe my poor words are making any fundamental difference in her life or decision-making. My mother died when I was in college, and I found myself fully equipped to make a good life. If I died tomorrow, I would die confident that my daughter is more than sturdy enough to withstand the loss without a major alteration of her destiny.

But it is true that for first time in several years, I feel the nature and the timing of my words—the few I share and the many more that I judiciously withhold—might make some difference in a life whose happiness matters so much to me that it’s dangerous to speak of it directly.

And then, every once in awhile, she truly does need my advice. Just last week, she was preparing to mail a card for her mother’s birthday. “Dad,” she texted, “where do I get stamps?”

Which took me back to when she was about six, and I was explaining to her how to dispose of her tray, at a Chicago cafeteria. 

“Dad,” she said, “this isn’t my first rodeo.”

Then she hesitated, and asked, “Wait. What is a rodeo?”