I fear my daughter is on the wrong path.

She’s a ferociously determined high school sophomore. Her heart fixed on the Ivy League and earbuds locked in; she is typically at the dining table homeworking past eleven. Last night I fell asleep to her chanting something about “R” squared.

She’s a leader at school and bi-weekly speaks to her two younger sisters at home. They do share the same room and a small but updated Brooklyn apartment bathroom. We are all kinds of proud of her. 

For all her A’s and activities, I doubt her glittering academic path will include a cut day. 

A cut day. Ditch day. Skip day. No way, not going to school today.

An unsanctioned cutting out and seizing of the day. Undetected. Preferably with a friend or two. Teenage freedom. 

We thought we were doing the right thing as parents. We read to her every night. Every page of Roly Poly Pangolin and every page of I Had a Favorite Dress, no skips. Then she read! So many, many books.

We supported her choice of an academically challenging high school. We told her anything is possible if she works hard. I never fully thought through the consequences of these actions.

This fifteen-year-old is in it to win it. Doing her version of Simone Biles on the academic balance beam: advanced classes, national debate tournaments, and choreographing dance performances as a triple layout. In her mind, the slightest slip means getting left off the Ivy admissions podium. I empathize; the pressure is real.

I also fear that what we have here is my failure to communicate perspective.

Whatever the college notification letters will say, she will be good. There are plenty of different ladders to climb. And there are chutes with each ladder. She can climb any of them or make her own. I want her to not miss the sandbox for the ladder. The ladder has the next rung, and eventually, the last rung. The sandbox is limitless. 

The sandbox is freedom to wander. To be out and about with no particular place to go. You might get into something, or nothing at all. The seeing and sensing is the thing. 

 I’ve told my daughter about my climb on the ladder but not my love for the sandbox.

She knows I went to a “name” college. She’s been to my office at a well-known company. I became suspicious of my parenting when she found the boardroom cool.   

She doesn’t know about my cherished cut days from work, walking around the city taking in the chaos and characters.

She also doesn’t know about when I took my first cut day when I was in high school.  

The school part of school was my jam. I wasn’t the smartest or hardest working student. I just enjoyed learning and asking questions in class. The school building was my playground. Except for the mechanical classes. My shop teacher told me if he ever saw a bridge with my name on it he would get out of his car and swim.

Fall of sophomore year, I dated an adventurous girl from Sunset Park. We were the same age and went to the same school but somehow she had seen more of the world in her years. Spring hit hard. So long grey and greyer. Hello baby pink and blossom blush.  

I was happy with a bit of sun during the lunch period. Amelia Earhart couldn’t wait to decamp our beige walls for wide skies. She proposed the craziest thing I had ever heard at that point – cutting out of school. Why would we? We have everything we need here. What do they have outside? And what if we got caught, could it derail college?  

Somehow, I still had a girlfriend, and she was still itching to ditch school. She was more persuasive than another chemistry review. On a blue sky seventy-seven degree day, the homeroom bell rang us into the wild.  

We ended up at South Street Seaport, which had a wraparound wooden terrace facing the water. We found a spot away from the masses and were appreciating springtime in the sun when I heard it. I looked around but didn’t see anything and so returned to Amelia. Then she heard it too. We looked up and were approached by someone who identified themselves as a photographer for the Daily News.  

The photographer was doing a story on New Yorkers on the best day of the year so far. No, no you are not. My girlfriend quickly let it be known she couldn’t have her picture in the paper. Her dad would see it and that would be that. My parents didn’t read the Daily News, so I wasn’t worried about them. I was worried about her dad who I understood to have several firearms stashed in their apartment, souvenirs from misunderstandings back in Greece. 

I was at the newsstand the next morning finding religion and ripping through the Daily News. No need to flee to a Canadian high school just yet. What was I thinking? I didn’t take another cut day the rest of high school.

I remember that day clearly. Don’t ask me a thing about chemistry.  

My daughter is taking chemistry now. There have been tears. I can’t help her there. I stopped trying to help with homework after fifth grade, mostly to protect my ego. I can offer a different solution though. She should try a cut day.   

Not a skip and stay at home day. A cut day must be taken outside. Being out and about is what gives the flavor. Outside with your five senses. Feeling the sun, touching grass. A flaky croissant with the carefree cafe folks. Walking down the block and being bumrushed by the stink of hot roasting trash.  

That is the joy of a New York City cut day. You get to wander the halls of the Met museum and dance in the blues of a Matisse. You get to post up on a waterfront bench with a bánh mì and watch sail boats flirt with Lady Liberty.   

My hope for my daughter is for her to achieve her dreams and for her to cut out and frolic. Maria from “The Sound of Music” twirled in the Alps and frolicked so hard the nuns had to sing about it. “She could throw a whirling dervish out of whirl.” My daughter used to twirl. She’d twirl to the table to eat breakfast, and twirl to the bathroom to brush her teeth. 

She still dances, but inside during classes. She needs to be out on a cut day out twirling. Brooklyn sidewalks are alive with the sound of music. Maria frolicked and twirled and outwitted some Nazi’s. Twirling is practical.

For her cut day to be a success for her, and for me, it must go undetected. For her, it will be the sweet feeling of breaking the rules and getting away with it. For me, it will be the bliss of ignorance.

I can’t have the school contacting us, wondering with my wife where we went wrong with such irresponsible frivolity. Not after we sent her to summer camp for three years. We could be driving a new car with that camp money instead of the minivan that keeps getting confused for an Uber. Who does she think she is?  

A successful cut day is a stealthy cut day. I know what she is capable of. I’ve seen her own the floor in congress competitions. I believe she can fly. I know she can swim with the sharks and run with the wolves. I don’t know if she has learned the ways of Anansi, or the trickster. 

There’s a time for hunting, and a time for cunning. What better way to test her skills than a stealthy cut day? And it’s important to me for her to succeed. How else am I going to know she can figure out how to slip me a chocolate chip cookie under the nursebot’s synthetic nose.  

And here indeed is the rub. I have no idea how a student mission impossible’s an undetected cut day. She swipes an ID card to get in and out of school. If she leaves and doesn’t come back, we will know. If she figures that out, how does she evade the tracking on her phone?  

My challenge is figuring out how to suggest a cut day. She can’t know it came from me, and neither can my wife. I could ask one of her older cousins to plant the idea, but that could lead back to me. Maybe Ferris Bueller for family movie night? More likely, they’d walk out and go back to Gilmore Girls. So how does a dad discreetly plant the idea that a responsibly taken cut day might be exactly what she needs?

And if I find a way to suggest a cut day, how will I know she succeeded? If she is truly successful, I won’t know she was out and about. How will I know that I’m not a failure of a father? How will I know she found the sandbox?  

Maybe one morning, when I’m long off with the ladder, I’ll be on a bench reading and avoiding my green juice. Nursebot will be impressed and distracted that my Supreme Court justice daughter is visiting. I’ll find a chocolate chip cookie in my hand, and smile. She made it.