A father confronts his daughter over bad grades and blames a boy she's involved with. She insists the boy isn't the problem, crying as she says it, but he shouts that she has to choose. She picks the boy, and the argument ends there, though its effects don't.
The poem is told mostly from the father's side, and what he feels at the end is regret. The words "haunt" and "taunt" sit side by side, and the rhyme makes the memory feel like something that follows him around, day and night. The line "His little girl grew up. / In one day" suggests he lost her closeness in a single moment, and that he sees his own anger as the cause. His last line, "Oh the choices I gave," turns the title around: the daughter made a choice, but he was the one who forced it.
The mood is sad and quietly accusing. Short, clipped lines make the shouting and the aftermath feel abrupt, as if there was no time to take anything back.