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By Jase Graves

In recent days, the hormonal distribution in my household has become slightly more balanced as two of my three teenage daughters and several lines of credit are now off attending college. This means that when I’m at home, I only receive the contemptuous side-eye from my wife, my youngest daughter, two female dogs and a female cat anytime I produce even the most innocent of bodily noises.

Yes, my happy-go-lucky middle daughter has left the nest — with a trail of glitter, jewelry beads and other expensive craft supplies in her wake. Things around here will be a lot quieter without her, and probably a heck of a lot less fun.

I’ve often said that my middle daughter is the marshmallow center of the sibling Moon Pie, and we’ll definitely miss her infectious silliness, which has occasionally involved wearing a pair of underwear or one of our pets as a hat.

Now that she’s gone to college, I’ll be missing the daughter I can’t sit beside (or even look at) during church services, weddings, nice dinners or any other polite company without risking an eruption of giggle snorts or beverages spewing out of our nostrils.

This is the daughter who once aspired to be a professional shopper, and when we asked for whom she planned to shop, she exclaimed that she would be shopping for herself — of course. Over the years, she has become an expert in this line of work.

This is also the daughter whose insides, by now, have probably mutated into a viscous mass of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. In fact, whenever we ran out of the candy, she could be found at any given hour of the day or night lurking in our kitchen pantry — committing culinary atrocities against a large jar of creamy Jif and a jumbo bag of Nestle Tollhouse Milk Chocolate Morsels.

This is the daughter who, over the years, has attempted to transform our home into an unlicensed exotic petting zoo. Incidentally, by housing numerous hedgehogs, fancy mice, hermit crabs, hamsters, dogs and cats, I’ve developed well-honed skills in the field of droppings-management. (If I could only find some way to turn it into a side gig.)

When she wasn’t trying to convince me to blow a couple of C-notes on another pet whose poop I would get to scoop, this is the daughter who had a habit of going to the ophthalmologist to have a variety of foreign objects plucked out of her eyeballs. I don’t think she ever got a hedgehog lodged in there, but I’m sure she considered it.

And speaking of pet droppings, since puberty hit and ruined everything, this is the daughter who has taken every possible opportunity to invite various hairy-legged species of teenage boys (usually in desperate need of a haircut) for awkward meetings with me so that I could evaluate them and offer to show them my collection of Bibles and body bags. Fortunately, when she left for college, she managed to avoid packing a take-along boyfriend in her laundry hamper — I think.

I desperately love all three of my daughters. They are all delightfully different, and I’ve learned to annoy each of them according to their own unique personalities.

With my eldest and most expensive daughter entering her sophomore year of spending my life savings, and my middle daughter spreading her sunshine as a college freshman, my youngest teenage daughter will now be our honorary “only child.” And although she tends to be stoic and quiet, she does have a silly streak, so we’ll do our best to commemorate her middle sister from time to time by spewing beverages out of our nostrils and wearing our underwear as a hat.

— Jase Graves

Jason (Jase) Graves is a national award-winning humor columnist, a married father of three daughters, a lifelong resident of Longview, Texas, and a Texas A&M Aggie. He writes about home and family issues from a humorous perspective for the Cagle Cartoons syndicate and his blog. Other than writing, his primary hobby is sleeping as late as possible. His winning Nickie’s Prize for Humor Writing essay, “The Sisterhood of the Giggling Rants,” is included in Sisters! Bonded by Love and Laughter, published by the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop. His piece, “Victoria’s Worst-Kept Secret,” is included in Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Crazy Family.