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When our two oldest girls were maybe two and three, we went to The Children's Festival in a grassy waterfront park to see Charlotte Diamond. She's a mom and a singer who went pretty big time with her little jingles about the laundry, and what a good thing pizza is when it gets delivered for dinner in a cardboard box. She teaches young children, through music, about metamorphosis and about nature's way - about little fish getting eaten by bigger fish, and how each subsequent predator gulps down his link in the chain. There is a great ditty about how she wants to be a dog (don't we all?) and another about how four hugs a day are the minimum, not the maximum. All wonderful little messages to parents and children about the way we should be, and about the way we are. At the time laundry was a minor issue for me, because little kids wear little clothes and you can wash a whole bunch of them in one load. And you decide how often they get changed, and you get to decide what they wear, at least until they are three or four. After that you put a cute little button on the front of their outfit that says "I dressed myself today" so all the other Moms you meet out in the real world won't think you are totally tacky. One of my best friends has a daughter who insisted on wearing the most incredible frou-frou outfits when she was teeny. Tight-fitting clothes, covered in sparkles or sequins, made of spandex, layered with tulle, wrapped in belts, all in clashing colors, of course. Awoosh. If it wasn't tight, it wasn't right. My friend is Mother Earth. This same friend of mine has very cool taste and an eye for design. So she would take me to the sample sales and we'd load up on all these really neat clothes at wholesale prices, made by a company founded by four local moms who started a home-sewn children's funky and functional clothing business and piloted it to international success. It was big, baggy, colorful stuff with whimsical themes like stars and moons or the circus. Lucky for me, my kids liked it, and it was so durable and adorable that it was worn by both of them and a lot of it by their baby sister several years later too. I could never have afforded it at full price, but wholesale (and less) made it within reach. Her daughter wouldn't wear the stuff, unless it was form fitting and two
sizes too small. My friend's daughter's little brother wanted to wear a
dress for a while, too. Well, not exactly a dress. More like a long nightie.
With frothy pink high heeled sandals. It reminded me of a muumuu from Maui.
I recall it was pink and white with a frilly neckline. And his mom was incredibly
cool about the whole thing. She just let it be, and tried not to get exasperated
with her kids, even though it must have pained her (and worried her, too)
to see them both looking so, well, tarty. She kept them out of the clutches
of school counselors and kiddie psychologists, and one day they figured
out all on their own that they didn't want to dress like that anymore. Her
daughter wears jeans now and her son keeps a menagerie of bugs and reptiles
in his room. But the thing about her is, that even if they had decided to
wear clothes like that for the rest of their lives, she would have been
okay with it. That is acceptance.
Our two older daughters were five or six when they shut the door on my influence over what they wore. Well, to some degree, anyway. I still bought the clothes, they just chose which ones to wear, and in what combination. Every now and then, something truly hideous would find it's way into the house (I couldn't never take them shopping with me, that's a wee bit too autocratic, even for me). Normally, I would just try to narrow it down to some stuff that we all could live with, and it would be a done deal. |