When it comes to being a “girl dad,” Austin von Letkemann has a good handle on things. The military intelligence officer from Fort Cavazos, Texas, is dad to four daughters ages 3, 6, 8, and 10. And while von Letkemann will tell you any day of the week how much he loves raising his girls, he has a powerful message for strangers in public who still find it necessary to say “I’m sorry,” when they discover how many women are under his roof.
“My daughters can understand you,” he said in an Instagram video with more than 146,000 likes.
“Every single time I go out …. if I have my four daughters, they’ll come up to me and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ All my kids can speak and understand English. They know what you’re saying. It hurts their feelings.”
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The dad continued, “I’m not sorry that I have daughters. I love being a girl dad. I love having girls. The joke is old. It’s worn out. It’s not original. It’s not clever. It doesn’t even make a lot of sense.”
He says in addition to the “silly goose” response, he often gets told to have his shotgun ready.
“The funniest thing is, if you ask them why (they said “I’m sorry”), they immediately get very uncomfortable,” von Letkemann noted in the video. “Why are you sorry? What are you getting at here?”
The dad says he gets the comment almost anytime he goes anywhere with his daughters, while his wife never hears it.
Saying “I’m sorry,” says von Letkemann, says that it’s unfortunate your family doesn’t have sons, something he says is sexist.
In addition, he says the “shotgun” reference is objectifying and totally off-base.
“It’s gross,” he says. “You never hear people say, ‘Raise your sons to not try and sleep with everyone.'”
As a strong male figure in his daughters’ lives, von Letkemann fears that by seeing people show empathy toward him simply for their existence, sends a subliminal message to his girls about the value that society places on them as women.
“Honest to god, if I had a fifth child — which is not going to happen god willing — if I had a fifth child, I’d hope it was a girl,” he said in his video. “There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
As one of three girls myself, I can tell you from experience, that the sheer joy von Letkemann gets from being a girl dad speaks far louder than any silly comment people could ever make.
Growing up, people would say the same thing to my dad, who proudly boasted about his “sorority,” and though I heard the comments my whole life, I never took offense to it because I knew how much my dad truly loved it. I think it’s safe to say the same about von Letkemann and his love for his girls.
Still, let’s ditch unnecessary comments and build parents up.
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