This story is about the moment when I was awakened to the reality that who I still thought of as our beautiful little girl Leona, was actually age eighteen and a very beautiful woman by anyone's measure. My wife still laughs at me when we discuss this moment because she says I was just not listening or paying attention to her, as often seems to be the case in our family.
As a child in grade school Leona was a happy, intelligent student who excelled in academics, and she had lots of nice friends. In Mexico it is common for elementary level students to wear uniforms to school, as did Leona. Leona's uniform was a nice white button up blouse, a moderately short pleated skirt, knee socks and nice shoes. Appropriately conservative in nature as expected, and each school year the color/style changed slightly, but mostly her uniform remained the same.
There was nothing out of the normal about this to me except that I made note of the fact that Leona looked very much like her beautiful mother. I recall back in those days thinking that she would be a handful in her teenage years because all the boys would probably be after her when she matured. Likely this is the mindset of many fathers who have daughters.
When Leona was eighteen years old, Eva mentioned to me that Leon's breasts had developed, but not to the extent that I took any notice of them. Being a mother Eva was carefully monitoring Leona's physical development for health reasons, plus Leona and Eva often showered together and changed cloths together so that she often saw our daughter nude. Leona was modest and careful not to expose herself to me which at the time seemed perfectly understandable for an eighteen-year-old girl.
Over this year Leona began to be critical of her physique and she wore cloths that hid her physical attributes. Additionally, she began to almost fear nudity thereby alarming Eva, and also me. Eva and I have always been free thinkers and we did not hide this fact from Leona. She was aware that her parents were weird in this way, or at least that was what she said jokingly.