Our Daughter Has A Secret (and We Can’t Tell You What It Is)
My wife and I can’t say what our younger daughter does for a living. It’s not that it’s hard to describe; it’s that we’re not allowed to say. She might as well work for the CIA (but she doesn’t, although of course I would say that even if she did).
What I think I can say is that she works for a global entertainment conglomerate. And her area of focus is “entertainment”. If pressed, I sometimes push the envelope by saying that she’s “friends” with various beloved larger than life characters. She hangs out with these beloved characters in magical “themed” settings. But now I’ve said too much…
My daughter gets angry and concerned when my wife or I discuss what she does with anyone. Seems that the global entertainment conglomerate takes itself very seriously, and any hints that magic isn’t real are supposedly met with swift unmerciful “justice”/retribution.
On a couple of occasions we’ve dared to post pictures online of a beloved larger than life character with little or no explanation. The resulting indiscrete posts by friends and neighbors, daring to speculate that magic might not be real and that our daughter might be implicated in a massive cover-up of that fact, have caused her multiple heart attacks and strokes and led to awkward attempts to delete.
As an interesting additional wrinkle on the situation, our older daughter works for the same company and has a perfectly respectable non-clandestine job. Ordinarily we’d be allowed to talk about her and her normal job, but under the circumstances it could offer dangerous clues concerning the vocation of our younger one.
I’m writing this on the plane, returning from visiting our daughters at their place of employment. I think I can mention that the airport code starts with an (unintuitive) M without fear of major reprisal, but don’t ask me anything else. And yeah, it was a great trip and we’re very proud of our kids.