A Whole Bundle of Things
in which i attempt to raise a daughter
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First, there was the pink tutu, with the almost-macrame bodice and the embroidered flowers, sent by a family member who lives on a small island in Hawaii that used to be a leper colony. My daughter was too young for it, not even out of onesies, so I passed it on to her older brother, who liked to slide it on over his clothes and spin in circles until he collapsed from dizziness. After a year or so of interest in what he called “beautiful dresses,” my son cleared out the tutus, and my daughter began putting them on over her pants or under a skirt, insisting that she couldn’t participate in a family dance party if she didn’t have enough “twirl.”
Then there were the Elsa dresses. The Frozen franchise, deep in songbook but shallow in humanistic-body-types, finally came for us. When Halloween came around, and Grammy Bev started taking costume commissions, I convinced my daughter to go with her second choice, an owl, rather than waste Grammy’s talents on something you could buy at any ol’ Walgreens. My daughter made a fabulous owl, round and brown and not store-bought in the least. We were so self-satisfied when all of the other kids showed up to school as heavily-branded, heavily-gendered characters. But the owl had a tinge of sadness to it, and not just from the way its little mortarboard tended to slide over its eyes so you could only see half of its face. It had really wanted to be a princess.
There were the fairy wings, not one, but two. I suppose one of them may be a butterfly. There was a black-and-blue lacy number, picked up for a dollar at a thrift shop and dubbed the “Queen of Bats” dress, which at least was a little punk rock. There were the party favors her aunt purchased for her birthday, two packs of rainbow-colored tutus, which most of the girls and one of the boys excitedly donned. There was an enormous, floor-length tulle gown, wrapped in plastic with a crown and wand, a gift from Grammy, who felt bad about the Elsa dress that never happened and was proud that she had at least found a small-batch designer on Etsy to transform my daughter into anthropomorphized cotton candy.
There are accessories, too, housed in something she calls her “wear box.” Headbands and bejeweled sunglasses and a unicorn ring and countless homemade necklaces with pink and purple beads, which never seem to fit over her head. There is a small set of real make-up, which I have tried to disappear, though it was a kind gift from someone who just wanted to give her what she had asked for. I love many of these things separately. But it’s the gestalt of it all that is starting to wear me down.
And there is this: Right around her fourth birthday, in April, she started saying that she didn’t feel beautiful. She started saying she was dumb, that she hates herself. Sometimes she says these things with a little side-eyed smirk, clearly experimenting with our reactions. Sometimes she is so genuinely distraught that she wont get off of the floor, and mopes around all day repeating mantras about her worthlessness.
I know she is only four, that her language is more advanced than her ability to grasp complicated, abstract concepts. I know that she cannot understand what “the day after tomorrow” really means, or the 15 is not the same as 51 or that people can still see you if you stand behind a tree that is smaller than you are. Children pick things up, try things on, see how adults respond. They don’t have sophisticated ways to express themselves, so they select a few crude options (at this age, my son’s were often to throw something or say “I hate you”) to cover a range of nuanced emotions. I know that a parent, when faced with their child’s distress, is meant to reflect, comfort without making unreasonable assurances, make measured, loving-but-boundaried statements like “it’s okay to feel this way.”
But it takes everything in me not to lie down on the ground with her in collapse. Not to scream at I don’t know who. Not to scoop her up and drive her off into the horizon and raise her in the woods somewhere far, far away from the male gaze. I know that the princess dresses and their accoutrements cannot be entirely to blame, the growing child is not that simple. Correlation does not equal causation. But I have come to associate them with this new development. It’s not that I wish they were gone, exactly, but I do wish they weren’t imbued with so much meaning.
In a recent interview in Salon, Gail Cornwall talked to gender-dynamics guru Peggy Orenstein, particularly about her response to a recent Emily Oster post about whether research supports the link between liking princesses and being fucked up. I have known about Orenstein’s work for some time, and keep meaning to read her books about raising boys. But somehow, getting parenting advice about raising a girl has been too tender, too overwhelming, and I’ve avoided it. I figured I’d learned enough to correct the mistakes of my parents’ generation, and the rest was out of my control.
In the article, Orenstein says “Girls are bombarded with messages that reduce their value to their appearance. That starts from pretty much birth and accelerates during those preschool years; by the time they're on social media, it's a fire hose. Does that mean that if your daughter plays with Disney princesses at three she'll be anorexic at 15? That would be absurd to say. But it does mean that if we're not in there thinking about and countering the ways the media is training our girls around body image and sexuality, we are letting them raise our girls for us.” She goes on to explain that it’s not exactly the playing princesses that is the problem, but the commercialization and the emphasis on bodies and beauty. She suggests that we incorporate more open-ended activities and playthings into our daughter’s repertoires, and that we call out how they are being lied-to in order to further patriarchal capitalism (“Look how tiny her waist is. I wonder where she keeps her uterus.” was my fave suggestion).
In another article, Orenstein shares a story about asking her own mother not to play beauty salon with her daughter, but to do a tea party or something not focused on appearance instead. Reading this brought me a range of painful feelings—shame for all the times I had painted my daughter’s nails, which I now knew might lead her towards early and not pleasurable sexual experiences, anger that a parenting expert didn’t trust me to have a perfectly healthy nail painting sesh with my own child, and sadness that if the line between good parenting and bad parenting was as thin as the line between playing beauty salon and playing tea party, surely I should just give up now.
I cannot tell whether the stakes tied to these decisions are much greater than I think or much smaller. I love clothes. I love make-up. I love picking out a sensational outfit and twirling the fucking night away. I spend lots of time looking in the mirror. At forty-adjacent, I like this about myself. I derive mostly joy from caring about my appearance. But it was a long ass road to get here, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want my daughter to travel it.
We found the gold-skirted leotard around the corner, in a pile of free objects in front of a house that is always putting out free things, so much so that I feel highly invested in their family’s well-being. My daughter wasn’t with us, and I was conflicted about whether to bring this thing, that would look so cute on her and make her so happy, home. It really was beautiful, kind of vintage-like. She jumped up and down when I showed it to her. “It’s perfect, mama!”
She wore it all that day, out to a birthday party, where there was at least one other girl in a full-on princess gown, and later, when we were eating lunch at a Mexican restaurant, the man next to us, in one of those classic bait-and-switches where you think someone is being kind until you realize, too late, that they actually said something horrible and you were somehow complicit in it, asked if she picked out her outfit herself, and when I nodded a little proudly answered “That’s what’s wrong with the children today. They don’t have any innocence anymore.
There was a really rad episode of the NY Times Daily podcast this month, where our boy Mikey B interviewed a pair of ten-year-old twin girls, one of which chose to be a girl scout, and one who chose to join the boy scouts. Then, he came back and interviewed them five years later. They both seemed real solid. Towards the end of the piece, the girls’ father (there is no mother mentioned, which I find to be a relief, but then maybe, I think, these girls are so self-actualized because they didn’t have a woman around to pass on her shit to them) reflects on having daughters. “They’re a whole bundle of things aren’t they?” he tells Mike.
I hate when people talk about how relieved they are to have boys — that girls are well behaved at first but you pay for it in psychological warfare. It reflects how little emotional and psychological depth we expect of males in our culture, part of learning to be a person in touch with your emotions is experiencing emotional turmoil, isn’t it?But it also reveals how accepting we’ve become about the pressures our daughters face as they grow-up. “Wait till she’s a teenager!” we say, like we aren’t good-naturedly rolling our eyes about our society’s deep-rooted and early-fought warfare against women. I have been reading Melissa Febos’s new book of essays, “Girlhood,” and finding myself terrified about raising a girl, not because I am shocked by Febos’ painful tales of her own self-loathing and sexual encounters, but because I find them so relatable, so mundane, to a girl’s life.
My friend has two daughters and says that when they ask if they look good, she reminds them that it’s not how they look to others, but how they feel in something. A man named Daniel, who I accosted at a party this weekend about my own daughter’s recent behavior because he has two older daughters who sound really sweet (one good-naturedly ribbed him over Facetime on the ride over that he would be the oldest person at this party, which he probably was), said with great confidence that everything is going to turn out fine. I keep thinking about another friend who, when her daughter started ballet and began, all of a sudden, to be afraid of things, said “fuck no” and switched her to martial arts. That daughter is very self-assured, though she ist still young, there is time. My sister-in-law told me once that she didn’t make a big fuss over how beautiful her daughters were in, say, a new vintage gold leotard. She fussed, instead, over their persistence and integrity. My friend who grew up in Berkeley had a mom who wouldn’t let her wear pink. I should probably call her and ask her if she hates herself, and how she is raising her own daughter.
When the man at the Mexican restaurant said what he said, my first thought was “she can do what she wants!” and also “how innocent do you think things actually used to be for girls???” And then my second thought was that this man, even in a very abstract way, was looking at my four-year-old daughter and thinking about sex. I stood in the line outside ballet class this Saturday, all of this swirling around while I watched the cluster of little girls in some variation of the same pink leotard and tutu. A kind of scruffy, hippie-looking dad pulled up in a beat-up van, and I felt a flicker of hope, but then he pulled out, you guessed, it, in a little girl in a pink leotard and tutu.
“Kids should be able to express themselves however they want, and do what they want, not just what society tells them they should want,” one of the now-grown-up twins, the one who did girl scouts, tells us. I know that my daughter likes tutus, though I don’t really know if it’s because she thinks other people like them on her. I know I don’t like myself when I feel superior to other parents because my son is comfortable enough to wear a dress, or because I convinced my daughter to wear a homemade, non-gendered Halloween costume. I don’t think this is a contest, and I don’t think it’s as simple as wearing a black leotard with the words “death to the patriarchy” embroidered on it (though I think that would be pretty cute). But I do wish that I had a pink frilly magic wand that I could wave to protect my daughter from what is certainly, even if we can’t really reliable have clear solutions to avoid it, a culture that will happily feast on her insecurity. And also to clean up these dresses. They are literally everywhere.
Also, this:
A friend said I should write about my love of baking, which I think is generally pretty covered on the internet. But I do have a dream of making an “ADHD Cookbook” with fun little snippets like this, straight from my experience baking a huge pink birthday cake (for a man!) this weekend:
-1 tsp baking soda*
*if you dont have this, even though you swear you checked all the ingredients before you went shopping, and you made a list, though you lost it, and then you even realized you didn’t have it morning of, and went to the store, but they didn’t have it, and you really didn’t have the morale to go to another store, and then you borrowed some from the one neighbor who is not sick of you borrowing things you’ve forgotten to get at the store, but then after you used it you checked the expiration date and it was July 2015, it’s ok.
But like so many ADHD journeys, even though knowing what the process was like would make blood shoot out of your eyeballs (the sprinkles aisle at Michaels almost took my life), the final product was at least a B plus! Happy birthday Mac Barnett, lover of pink and beautiful clothes and bringer of literary joy and god-fatherliness to my tutu-loving daughter.
Just a fellow parent (to twin daughters) here, standing behind a tree that is too small to hide me, feeling all of this so very much.
I have two children, raised the same way, who turned out very differently in appearance and very similar in values and critical thinking. We stressed curiosity, love of learning, wear whatever you want from your drawers. Both had yellow and green onesies, any "gender" diapers, homemade/used Halloween costumes and store bought characters (any gender). They always picked Barbie dolls at the thrift stores and then brought them home and gave them punk haircuts and painted them with nail polish (all over!). Both, as young adults, now play with gender, despite their identity differences - one is heterosexual, cisgender and the other lesbian, gender nonconforming. I say, when they are little, bring it all home, see what they choose and let them experiment. Provide praise for creativity and experimentation. Peggy Orenstein binary be damned... My two cents. -- Old Mom down the street