Trying to fit into my daughters’ world

If the war in Iraq and Tiger Woods’ recent flameout at the Players Championship haven’t left you needing to lighten up today, read something else.

For years I have tried to convince my daughters that what a woman needs to feel good in life is a top-of-the-line table saw, but my view has failed to take. The day they told me that a good bra is important to a sense of a woman’s well-being is the day I finally realized that my daughters and I are from different worlds; they are from JC Penney (a.k.a. Jacques Penoir), and I am from Woodworkers Warehouse. That one of them then flashed me with the new Victoria’s Secret bra she was wearing to prove her case just hammered the point home.

Lord knows I have tried to get them to live in my guy world. There may be three women in my house but the tools here still outnumber the skirts. There isn’t a room in my home that I have not taken over and covered with sawdust as part of some home improvement project. They grew up listening to their father conduct the Delta Tools’ Symphony of Saws. I have invited my daughters’ participation at every turn of the blade, to every polyurethane and painting party, hoping to have them develop an appreciation for the wonders of home renovation and the beauty of a made-in-Maine Lie-Nielsen hand plane.

Thus far, however, all of my efforts have been in vain. To them a table saw is just a flat surface begging for a vase of flowers. They cannot understand why a guy without at least three drills has unmet needs. They think Saturday morning should be wasted on sleep, and will not accept that it’s really the ideal time to crank up the compressor and drive some nails. The two of them roll their eyes in disbelief when I tell them a guy cannot have too much plywood in the barn, and neither sees anything useful in the fact that I will be prepared if there is ever a national plywood crisis. Stockpiling underwear and lip gloss, on the other hand? That they would do, without even being told to do so by the Secretary for Homeland (and Lip) Security.

I, on the other hand, am sensitive enough to have made a lot of effort to fit into their world. I even let them train me to buy tampons, and now can do so without breaking a sweat. (The trick is to just act like you are buying drywall, and to know what kind to buy before you leave home. There are more kinds than there are paint colors, and spending a lot of time lurking around the feminine products section of the store trying to figure out which type to buy will arouse suspicion of store staff.) I get more credit in my house for being able to buy tampons than if I had killed a charging rhino with my bare hands, dragged it home, cooked it, and slung it on the dinner table with rings of pineapple around its horns and an apple stuffed in its mouth.

Being a doctor has helped. My daughters know that many of my patients are women who don’t come in to talk to me about Dewalt’s 14-volt right-angle hand drill. They assume that if I can talk to female patients about things like periods, men, sex, abuse and puberty, I should be able to talk to my daughters about those important issues without fidgeting. And I can, although there are some conversations during which I wish my pager would summon me ASAP to some emergency.

The real problem now is that I am so steeped in estrogen I am starting to occasionally think like them. I found myself the other day looking forward to the arrival of the new JC Penney catalog, and then thumbing happily through the L.L. Bean Home catalog.

I have also been worrying about whether the color of the new chair is going to go with the new wallpaper.

To recover I will have to plane some wood I recently bought even though I have no idea what I am going to do with the stuff. I should then be protected against further estrogen osmosis by a layer of wood chips.

In the end, however, I will win them over to spending occasional time in my world. They don’t know it now, but somewhere deep in their brains is the home improvement lobe, coded for by the home improvement gene I contributed to their chromosomes. Some day, in their first homes, they will consider some renovation idea and think, “You know, if I just had the right power tool, I could do that project myself.”

The Symphony of the Saws will start playing in their heads, awaken them early on a Saturday morning, and they will be drawn irresistibly to Woodworkers Warehouse (via Dunkin’ Donuts, of course). There they will buy their first power tool, and I will have won, even if the tool is a pink table saw made by Victoria’s Secret, with an extension on it for a flower vase.

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.