I understand now why The Diva doesn’t respect my parental authority. As many of you guys out there can appreciate, it’s all My Lovely Wife’s fault.

The woman is simply too permissive.

I’m not talking about that “sure you and your driver’s-license-wielding, four-door-car-driving boyfriend can go for a walk around the lake even though we have no way to know and no reason to believe that’s actually where you are” kind of permissive.

Momma don’t play that.

Rather, she’s all willy-nilly when it comes to knocks on the bathroom door.

No matter what embarrassing necessities might be taking place behind the aforementioned door.

I’m what might be diagnosed as hairy. Were my body hair blue, purple or orange, I might look like something spawned from the imagination of Dr. Seuss.

Think Cousin It with a head like Uncle Fester.

And unless I want to scare small children at the beach who fear a toothy walrus has come ashore, I must occasionally be trimmed. I’m talking a full-body shaving from head to toe. (Granted, the top takes less time and precision that the other 6 feet, 1 inch of me.)

After my wife is done with the trimming, it looks like a dog groomer just finished shearing a black-haired Labradoodle.

This is something I’m not ashamed to write about, for I feel that a man’s personal grooming habits are a positive reflection of his overall mental health. I mean, if you look like a yeti, pretty soon you’ll act and feel like a yeti. (I’m guessing that the plural for “yeti” is “yeti” … like platypi or maybe platypuses being the plural for platypus … of course, you never see more than one yeti anyway …)

But I digress.

So there we were last Saturday afternoon, me in my boxer shorts, My Lovely Wife mowing a clear path through the underbrush, when there was a knocking at the door.

“Come in!” My Lovely Wife shouted over the hum of the electric trimmer from underneath my raised arm. And in strolled The Diva, giggling at me in all my beastly glory.

Keep in mind, there was nothing inappropriate going on. But still … this is just not the position one wants to see a parent in.

It’s the next worst thing to catching us skinny dippin’ — although that way at least we’d both be humiliated.

I shouted and grunted in protest, but the Band-Aid had already been ripped off. As anyone who’s sat through a Ben Affleck movie knows, some things are so awful that once they’ve been seen, they’re forever seared into your memory.

The sight of me shirtless and being shaved isn’t that repulsive and shouldn’t require later therapy, but it’s undoubtedly a vision that will pop into The Diva’s brain the next time she, for example, asks to go to the movies with her boyfriend.

I’ll start the negotiations with, “Well, it has to be a matinee … must have other people with you …” and then this look of wounded amusement — like watching helplessly as a stranger falls down in public — will slowly creep over her face.

She’ll try and glare it down, force that smile upside down, but I’ll see the change and wince at the shared memory, only I’ll be seeing it from her perspective and will then be powerless to stop her, powerless to say no, to discipline or to parent her in any way other than total surrender, leaving the heavy lifting to My Lovely Wife.

And that would be sheer madness.

Contact Brett Buckner at brettbuckner@ymail.com