I watched the action from behind my video camera. The footage positively percolates, a direct result of the quaking caused by my suppressed mirth. That first ballet recital was a doozy. My daughter was dressed in her pink leotard,tights and shoes, with her black ballet skirt, and fresh ribbons in her hair. With a group of eight three year olds and one instructor, you shouldn’t have high expectations. Yet, all the parents sat on the edge of their chairs, beaming at their little darlings. My little darling stood front and center, one hand on her hip, the other buried in her nose.
As the music started, all the girls except one pranced about the room on the heels of Miss Sharon. Mine galloped on all fours, whinnying like a stallion and tossing her ponytail. The antics continued throughout the thirty minutes, and left me hiccupping with tears in my eyes. My mother, who had sat with a stiff upper lip throughout the proceedings, waited until the kids were buckled into their car seats before she let fly.
“You have got to teach her that pretty princesses don’t act like that.” My mom gave me the Raised Eyebrow of All Seriousness.
“I’m not raising her to be a pretty princess.” I shot back, with my best cheeky grin.
“Well, if she doesn’t learn these things, she will struggle her whole life,” she intoned, with a disapproving glare. “I guess I’ll just have to teach her myself.”
We’ve gone many rounds in this argument over the years. Since the sonogram revealed girlie bits, I made plans for my future daughter. She would be funny and intelligent. She would have a sharp wit and a can-do attitude. Naturally, she would be beautiful, but all compliments and other observations about my daughter would NOT indicate that her beauty is the measure of her character.
I spoke of these expectations at length, with anyone who I feared would focus on the “Pretty Princess” ideal. I was a warrior for feminist infant rights. She would not be forced to wear scratchy lace. She would be encouraged to find her own voice, and show us who she was.
My mother sighed frequently. “You’re going to be in for a rude shock. She’s going to be a girlie girl and you won’t have any say over it. All little girls want to be feminine and pretty. You’ll see.”
I decided that she could be right. I had spent my childhood dreaming of princes and horse-drawn carriages. Oh, no. Wait. That was my older sister. At a year, I earned the nickname “Grub-fingers” for laying waste to my entire face using only saliva and an Oreo. At five, I wanted to own a bakery. I planned on having a few kids and a big candy dish on my future coffee table. I had a doll named Dozer, who got her hair rubbed off from my aggressive attempts to uncover artifacts in the yard using her head as a digging implement. I suspect that Mommy Brain has blocked all of this out of my mother’s memories.
My big girl enters kindergarten this year, and my youngest, also a daughter, is nearly two. The years have been full of exasperating moments that made me rant with frustration at the nerve of my girl, only to spend a half hour on the phone, proudly recounting the nerve of my girl.
I find humor in her candidness. Her honest appraisal of the world at large can be exhausting. While I was pregnant, she was fascinated with my bulging silhouette. I shared a shower with her, and got one of the biggest laughs of my life when she spontaneously composed and performed a song called “Big Fat Butt, Big Fat Belly.” She sees beauty in places where our eyes have learned not to linger.
This bluntness can be shocking, as well. We rented Walt Disney’s Cinderella on a rainy afternoon. The kids seemed to enjoy it. After dinner, during the bedtime toy roundup, I said, “Cinderella was always cheerful about helping her family, even when she didn’t want to.” My daughter squared her jaw and growled, “I’m not Cinderella.” Duly noted.
Although many of my not-so-girly tendencies have appeared in my daughter, there have been many surprises. She really likes coordinated outfits. She loves pretty things. She sparkles and purses her lips in delight when we play ‘fine ladies’ during a tea party. Then again, she also adores dinosaurs and spends hours growling and thrashing around with her brother and sister. She has a love of high drama, favoring disaster themes. “Mommy! The storm is coming! Get under the table!”
When I was a teenager, my mom issued a curse: “I hope you have three kids exactly like you!” Fate has a funny way of twisting things. Instead of getting three kids just like me, my oldest is almost an exact duplicate of my mom.
Which leads me to speculate: My mom was raised to be a wife and mother. Her mother was raised with the same goal. They were taught that the worth of a woman is her physical beauty, the spring in her husband’s step, the cleanliness of her laundry, the frugality of her budget, and the obedience of her children. To admit dissatisfaction in these womanly endeavors was a mark of shame in the suburbs of my mother’s youth. To admit failure was unthinkable. Pour me a drink. I’m never going to meet those standards.
My mother came of age during the late 1960s. She attended a high school where girls weren’t allowed to wear pants, and a third of the male graduates in her class died in Vietnam. Like most of her friends, she married six months after graduation, and started a family a short time later. My parents never were hippies. They had bills to pay and children to rear. Still, they were in their early 20s and quite groovy, judging from the photos.
The volatile world for women in the 1970s had a big impact on my mom. Despite her traditional upbringing, she instilled independence and ambition in her own daughters. We were encouraged to achieve. Our dreams were nourished, even when they failed. My sister and I joke about the schizophrenic nature of my mom’s advice. “Go out there and conquer the world! But first, put on fresh lipstick and straighten your hair before your husband comes home!” She manages a cross between a feminist and a traditional housewife from the Depression era.
In my daughter, I see all of the wild streaks that lie dormant in my mom’s soul. All the squelched desires and stunted dreams, all the unladylike impulses that Mom was forced to reject for fear of being a rebel will be embraced by my daughter. The little girl who warbled at the top of her lungs on the hilltop to her mother’s chagrin will sing again. With exuberance and good humor, my girl brings new life to the little girl that learned too early how a “Pretty Princess” behaves.
When my mom threatens to teach my daughter about proper behavior, I rarely get my back up anymore. It clearly didn’t affect me all that much. I think she enjoys having “spunky grandkid” stories to tell. I no longer forbid people to tell my daughter she is beautiful. She always answers, “I know,” in a matter of fact tone. Perhaps Grandma serving up some humble pie would be beneficial.
My baby daughter is already a rebel. She is tiny, and precocious, with a sense of humor that never fails to hit the mark. She issues orders with authority, refusing to allow her limited vocabulary to stand in her way. As the youngest of three siblings, she’s been jostled, hassled and thoroughly schooled by her older sister and brother. She works her feminine wiles with a shrewd mind and innate toughness. When she falls, she announces, “I fine.” This child will not be denied.
Is there any truth to my mom’s belief that trouble lies ahead for a girl who doesn’t embrace her accepted place? Perhaps. That is why I am committed to raising renegades. These children inspire me to learn more, demand more, be more. I am still the axis around which my children revolve, but as time passes, their orbits are elongating. They fly by, glowing under my mother-love beams, and shoot off again into the unknown.
My daughter, age five, has unshakeable confidence. She knows her own mind. Thinking ahead to the next few years gives me the vapors. What malevolent influences will she encounter? Will she be swept up in Barbie Envy? Will her queenly demeanor make her unpopular? I feel the gentle push of her will, letting me know that she is ready to go forth and make waves. My deepest desire finds my daughter, thirty years old, with confidence built from years of wonderful experiences, a woman knows her own mind and rolls her eyes when I insist that she wanted nothing more than to be a Pretty Princess.
