Prom dress cartel aside … you do you.
My girl.
After two very boyish boys.
Big blue eyes, apple cheeks, and fine blonde hair.
So fine that getting ready for the day could be a bit of a battle. Brushing that fine hair, that wound itself into a matted nest by morning (prim in the front-party in the back) was similar to unknotting a delicate chain necklace. Notwithstanding a bottle of de-tangler, it took precision, patience, and excellent hand-eye coordination. The primary difference being that pain was involved.
For both of us.
I admit I naively and perhaps shallowly expected to curate my daughter in my likeness. I imagined how adorable we would look. How cute would it be to walk around with a little mini-me dressed in tiny jackets, t-shirts, and boots?
You know where this going. It didn’t turn out that way.
My daughter did like boots. The cherry red cowboy boots we inherited for a rodeo-inspired Halloween costume. She wanted to wear them everyday. And not with the matching mini-me outfits I imagined. She wanted nothing to do with my neutral palette. She loved color! The more colors, the more patterns, the better. She was a walking explosion of pinks, oranges, purples, florals, stripes and checkers. I gave up carefully picking out her clothes. I ceded these decisions to my three-year-old. And we, as a family, dubbed the look “crazy cute.”
By kindergarten she was bound by a uniform. She didn’t have much wiggle room to express herself. I had long given up the battle with her tangles. (They won.) If she chose not to brush her hair, well, I stopped trying to make her. But I didn’t stop nudging her to do so before leaving for school. As if her tangles were somehow a reflection of my mothering.
That is, until one day on the drive home my sweet five-year old burst into tears.
“Emma told me I had messy hair,” she sniffled.
Vindicated, I thought. See that’s what you get for not combing your hair in the morning. Oh my gosh did I actually think that? No. Worse. I actually said that! Or something close to that.
“Well, does that make you want to brush your hair in the morning?”
I had the opportunity. I took it. Emma the Kindergartner was doing the dirty work for me.
But my gotcha moment did not last long.
My middle child, a boy three years her senior, displayed amazing people skills from a very young age. Gifted at diffusing Mother, he deftly knew when to insert a hug amidst building tension. He athletically lobbed “I love you” at the precisely perfect moment blocking the completion of a possible reprimand. I believe he intuitively turned the parenting adage, “distract and redirect” on us as soon as he could talk.
With that intact emotional IQ, he busted me.
“Mom, don’t you think that’s like saying what Emma did was okay?”
“Well, I didn’t mean that.” I squirmed, caught exploiting Emma’s boorish behavior for my own equally boorish agenda.
“Shouldn’t she be able to wear her hair anyway she wants to? I think Emma was mean,” said my eight-year-old Einstein of human interaction.
“Of course she should.” Shamed.
Here was the perfect opportunity to reinforce the value of kindness I plastered all around the house in crafty hand-painted signs. Instead, I used the teachable moment to tell my daughter to brush her hair.
And I blew a bunch of other potential positive body, feminist, ‘you do you’ messages along the way.
Fortunately for me, I’d get many more chances to not blow it on the road to my children’s adulthood. I can’t say I succeed every time. But I’ll die trying.
Flash forward almost a dozen years and one of those memorable opportunities arrive. #Prom.
It is prom season and things have changed a bit since my day. I am not talking about the poofy hair and bangs (yes bangs) that we somehow managed to levitate and then spray into a semipermanent vertical form. And I’m not talking about the ruffles, puffy sleeves, and otherwise bloated dresses my daughter would not be caught dead in outside of an ironic 80s party.
I’m talking about the PDPP racket. The prom dress purchasing process.
I’m talking about the military precision with which a (nameless) chain dress store executes its mission.
The appointments. The strict number of dresses in the room. The monopoly on colors. The cataloging. The technology. The fact that you cannot buy the same dress as anyone else from your school. Quite literally. As in they won’t let you.
(Well maybe your mom can pretend to be purchasing your dress for herself. Obviously she doesn’t go to your school but she’ll need a different credit card than the one you tried to buy the dress with, one that is not in the 21st-century-digital-dress-filing-system, to pull that off. Or so I’ve heard).
Not that showing up in the same dress is that great. But as a Prom Dress Libertarian, I just don’t think it should be the chain store’s decision. I think they-who-shall-not-be-named are part of price cartel as well.
Clearly it is NOT a free country. You do not have prom dress liberty! It may be time for a prom dress revolution.
(Happily, I think it’s already on the way. Kudos to those who traded with friends, rented, bought on consignment or actually found a dress from a different shop!)
Back to the point of this blog.
Seeing my daughter in her prom dress is one of those parent moments. The one where I might earn a little redemption for some of the mistakes I’ve made throughout the years.
It is her moment, (or their moment, or his moment) to express themselves as they wish to be expressed. A moment to celebrate youth. To be visible in the thing that they want to wear. In the way that they want to wear it.
And my job as parent is not to worry about how it fits, how tight or loose it is. How low, or high cut it is.
I hold my jaw firmly in place even though this shapely silhouette shows little resemblance to the sweatshirts and baggy bottoms to which I am accustomed.
I most certainly avoid saying “Wow!” aloud.
Nope.
My job is to reinforce, in the most low-key, non-embarrassing, nonobvious, subtle, totally non-parent-y way, that what my child chooses to wear should make them feel amazing. And whatever that is, however they choose to do it, is okay.
Especially if it’s crazy cute.
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