How could I have missed this milestone of compulsory heterosexuality? Who would teach my daughter whatever girls with fathers learned on these dates and dances, like how to wait for doors to be opened or hold a fork like an unmistakable catch ?

I repeated the “why not me?” challenge of her divine conception and commenced to plan the worst date of my life. I adopted the gendered script with gusto. I opened all the doors. I paid for all of the food. My 7-year-old date ignored me for the whole dinner because the host sat us in a makeshift kids’ section near the bar television. My date told me this couldn’t be a date because we were both girls. I’m queer. I pointed out that ours “obvi” wasn’t a romantic date because, hello, I’m her mother.

“Then why call it a date?” she asked.

Good question. Tom Burns of the Good Men Project wrote in 2017, “I think the almost-exclusive use of the word ‘date’ to describe daddy-daughter interactions just promotes this sick romanticization of our relationship that’s detrimental to both of us.”

I agree, but the thing that’s detrimental to my daughter and me is something very different. Nothing about our life is ever romanticized. What hurts us, instead, is the social and emotional toll of scholars and pundits suggesting, as they have for generations, that our very family unit — a black mother, a black daughter and no one to ring the doorbell with a suit jacket on — is a liability and the cause of any difficulties we may experience. In the face of this misguided moralizing, I sometimes find myself hypermotivated to give her everything children with “normal” two-parent families have, including braces and a mortgaged home and a dinner date to a place where the staff treats kids like royalty.

The waiters flirted with my date and ignored me. One said her French fries looked good. They looked like Burger King fries at 300 percent inflation. The other said her bread looked delicious, but I had the same bread and it just looked like dry bread, like the stuff Moses’ people complained about until God smote them like a mad dad in a normal family movie. She asked for meatballs without noodles. That didn’t even make any sense. When her dinner came back looking just like meatballs without noodles, she told the waiter, “This isn’t what I expected.” She ordered another entree that she also didn’t eat. I paid for it, but I already said that.