My best friend's brother was never seen without his even at school. Half Cherokee.
Friend and his brother:
Posted on 05/23/2015 10:58:54 AM PDT by drewh
The “ice princess” dress looked so innocent in the discount store, no idea what it was in for. It wasn’t a Disney-sanctioned, Elsa from “Frozen” dress, but it looked the part — an ankle-length number with a powder-blue velvet bodice, cerulean skirt accented by silver swirls, a white gauzy cape down the back and a plastic diamond gem centered just below the collar. Grace, nearly four, had been talking about being Elsa next Halloween since last Halloween. For $14.99, I figured I’d get a jump on her costume.
It’s odd that I would buy a princess dress for my daughter, let alone let her wear it nearly three weeks straight. Like a lot of pre-parenthood people, I had definite ideas of what wouldn’t happen in my home once a child entered it. No sugar. No TV. And for certain, no princesses, with their helpless ways and infuriatingly tiny waists.
Of course, like every parent, I laugh at today’s reality vs. my pre-child expectations. File TV and sugar under “if you can’t beat ’em…” And the princess thing — it’s ubiquitous, some kind of magnetic call from deep in her DNA. By osmosis, Grace knew the “Frozen” theme song, “Let It Go,” months before she ever saw the movie. Suddenly it was all “Frozen”-themed nail polish, pencil erasers, stickers and lip balm. Elsa had eclipsed Grace’s first love, Hello Kitty, and her second, Batman, who had even made an appearance at her birthday party. I took solace that at least Elsa and her sister Anna were plucky heroines who solved their own problems and helped each other, not like that doormat Cinderella (time to move on, girl, and start that vet-tech training) or the dim-witted Aurora of “Sleeping Beauty” (you had one job: “don’t touch the spinning wheel.” Just the one job).
So when I gave Grace the Elsa dress one Saturday afternoon, she put it on immediately and wore it the next day as well. On Monday, she wanted to wear it to school. I gently tried to change her mind. Getting her dressed makes me painfully, acutely aware of my control issues. In theory, it shouldn’t matter what she wants to wear as long as it’s seasonally appropriate. But a part of me I’d like to deny, but can’t all the time, wants her to wear what I’ve picked out, whatever is nuanced and correct for each occasion. Maybe it’s a kind of inability to truly separate myself from my daughter. Maybe it’s my own kind of latent narcissism, putting forth my daughter as a reflection of myself into the world. And then there’s the side-eye I imagine I’ll get from other preschool parents and staff (“who’s making the decisions here?”)
Grace is one of the most determined people I’ve ever met. She’s confident in her ideas, with a fierce independence that simultaneously calms and alarms me. When she was only a few weeks old, she insisted on holding her bottle herself. At two, she was able to pick ingredients and make her own sandwiches. Now, at nearly four, ain’t nobody going to tell her what to wear.
So for more than three weeks straight, she picked the Elsa dress, and to my shock, it was a win for me. Knowing what she was going to wear each day eliminated a good 20 minutes of outfit and dressing angst. Grace would accommodate practical exceptions for after-school activities and sleeping. (I know what you’re wondering, and yes, we’d wash the dress at night.) On day five, I started posting pictures on Facebook of her in the dress and how she styled it out: Rapper’s Delight with shades and a backpack; Santa Fe hippie with shell and crystal necklaces; Fresh Princess of Bel Air with pink sparkle Vans and a tiara. Friends started to check in daily to see if she was still wearing the dress. She was.
On day nine, her Aunt Karen sent in a stunt double: A real Disney Elsa dress, though a little scratchier from the stiff tulle on the arms and shoulders. No matter, Grace decided she would wear that one over the original one.
Day 12, ironically enough, happened to be Costume Day at school. It was Elsa, again, of course. This prompted a discussion about dressing up.
“I’m going to change my Halloween costume,” she said, looking at me, seriously, deliberately, as if explaining the complexities of an adjustable-rate mortgage.
“Oh really? What will it be?” I asked.
“Anna,” she said. Anna is the resourceful, fun princess sister who thinks up interesting things to do, while Elsa is like your worst emo-PMS friend from college, so I guess that would be an improvement.
By day 13, the dress-wearing had taken on a kind of anthropological, performance-art quality. I was in full support of her going with it as long as possible.
I suppose there are two kinds of parents: those who can’t roll with 23 days of an Elsa dress, and those who can. The reason I switched from being the former to the latter is because of what the dress means to Grace. It’s not because she’s waiting for a prince to rescue her, or because she’s trying to channel the glamour of Elsa’s lush platinum locks. It’s because, as she explained, “Elsa has ice powers.”
I understand the parents who worry. When I was 10, I rode New York’s crosstown bus to school and back, no chaperone required, a bus pass allowing me and my friends access to the entire city. Today, parents in my quiet, safe, L.A.-adjacent neighborhood barely let their tweens and teens walk a few blocks to the ice cream store. Most families are over-scheduled. Grace does karate, swimming and ballet, which she loves, but I wonder if it’s too much? I’m a single, working mom, and after school, there’s not a lot of time for a stock-photo life — flying kites in meadows or jumping around on the beach. Grace doesn’t have a lot of say in where she goes or how she spends her day. So if this little blue dress and what it symbolizes makes this small child in a big world feel powerful, I’m totally, utterly, completely down with that.
If it’s my job to help Grace along in her life, the least I can do is let her fly her own freaky flag — and enable her take her power where she can. The day of this writing, she broke the Elsa spell and opted for a long black sequin skirt my mother made her, a neon-pink tutu T-shirt, and silver sandals, an ensemble I’m calling “Boca Raton Pinochle.” Grace may or may not go back to the Elsa dress tomorrow. She’ll let it go when she’s ready.
Vanessa McGrady is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer specializing in parenting, small business, personal finance and things that make her go “hmmm.” She’s crazy in love with her own life right now. She’d be super thrilled if you come play with her on Twitter @VanessaMcGrady and read her blog at vanessamcgrady.com.
She would if you had control of your daughter, you idiot.
Let’s see, a mom who can’t say no to her daughter, and no dad because he said no to mom.
Fits.
Oh, Vanessa, you poor thing. You'll have no one to blame but yourself.
I don’t see the problem with this. Little girl wants to wear a nice, old-fashioned long princess dress, and mom lets her. So?
I’m just thankful her daughter is not really a boy.
I want to celebrate that.
Neither do I.
And the little girl who lived upstairs from my Grandparents, and who was my best , earliest friend, wore her red cowgirl boots everyday. To this day, she is known as “Bootsie.”
I don’t have a problem at all with the article. I have a daughter the same age. You don’t have to die on every hill when parenting, people. The daughter sounds bright and she is three and she went through a phase. Like the mom says, she doesn’t have much control. Her mom is working all day and her life is fully scheduled. To the little girl who still wrested a bit of harmless control, I say Bravo.
Those of you who plan on or already did raise kids with your iron fists, because you know who’s boss, I’m just going to shake my head. P.S. Google the Duggars because spare the rod and spoil the child doesn’t always work out so well.
So? I wore a Zorro costume for two years until the nice men in white uniforms took me to the Casa la Cuckoo.
At four and five, I let my kids wear the Halloween costumes that were socially acceptable until they wore out.
A Dora Princess dress is perfectly fine for pre-school and the playground, and wearing it in place of other clothes simply improves its utilization rate.
My best friend's brother was never seen without his even at school. Half Cherokee.
Friend and his brother:
omg that was hilarious! bravo cm..
Does the kid have a father?
On reflecting on the mothers attitudes as much as is possible..in this short family history, Id doubt that there is a father...in the home!
The mother exudes “Insufferableness”
I must be the only person in the country who has never seen “Frozen”
My 10 yo niece sung that off-key for at least six months straight, lol. I can do without hearing it again.
Child abuse...pure and simple. LIBs are malignant idiots.
- The titular daughter is a trans-daughter. If you do not heartily approve of a brave 4-year-old girl, you have no soul.
("First graders exposed to book about transgender boy—without parental notification": "The book is about a boy who identifies as a girl from the age of two, 'with a boy's body and a girl's brain.' He eventually finds a doctor who tells his parents, 'Jazz is transgender.'")
- The daughter is not 4 but 24, or 44, or 64...
- It emerges that the daughter is not actually her daughter, whether by birth, adoption, or any similar official arrangement. The article is actually not about the dress but about advocating a sort of relationship, which is currently undocumented; it must be accepted by the law and celebrated by everyone for the sake of social justice. How she came to procure the child may be never explained, or it may be rationalized in detail.
- The costume has been altered to express a leftist point. For example, maybe Helpful Mother has used glitter and sequins to add something like "DRAFT ELIZABETH WARREN" or "I'M 4 AND ALREADY WEARING A PRINCESS DRESS. FIGHT THE PATRIARCHY!!!" Maybe the ensemble is completed with a rainbow keffiyeh. I will award bonus points if the message is purportedly the little girl's idea.
- Maybe some basic princess dress is a constant, but the child demands expensive accessories, increasing by the day. Despite the author's misgivings about consumerism and consumption, she eventually happily obliges because the little girl's happiness outweighs the outmoded concept of financial balance. (Maybe she then wonders why less-privileged girls and boys can't do the same, and the article starts promoting higher taxes.)
- The daughter never wanted to wear the dress for 23 days, or even at all, but her mother forced her in order to make some "progressive" point.
- The daughter actually wanted to wear the dress, but the author didn't let her (even despite her general enlightened indulgence of children) because Princesses Are Bad. I can hear it now: "Racist, sexist, classist, lookist, ageist, anti-gay, / princesses and all their dresses all should go away!"
(I actually thought of this point before I read the quoted part of the article and saw related ideas therein. I'd be surprised if a Salon article about this subject didn't explain that the author isn't an unthinking conformist philistine who occasionally votes for Republicans.)
The sentence you just wrote can be translated simply as “mental illness”.
So, the “daughter” is really a metaphor for the love she never recieved as a child, or her daddy issues, or something.
Which is sad.
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