http://sahmanswers.com/news.php?readmore=2287I’ve been thinking a lot about issues of femininity, especially since having my daughter Anna and watching as she’s grown into a pink and sparkly preschooler. I look at her and I beam with something akin to pride at her girlishness if only because it so obviously and defiantly is something of her own. It has not been inherited from me. We are opposites in that way. Anna would live in her tutu - not the plain, pale pink one I bought in Target in preparation for her first ballet class, but the other one. The one my husband bought in Marshalls about a year ago. The garish pink and purple striped one with the sequins sewn into the tulle.
I took ballet as well, though I lasted quite a bit less than she has. Even though she is only three and a half, her dancing hours have outpaced mine already. Ballet was the first girlish thing I quit in shame, not fitting in. I didn’t speak the language or understand the code gained through osmosis for the other girls. One of my first lies was born out of ballet class. Mortified and determined that I just could not go through with the class one afternoon, I faked a stomachache and a headache. (I wanted to cover all of my bases.) My mom bought it. Swathed in relief, I got to skip it one afternoon.
I knew I couldn’t push my luck, so I attended the next one, savoring the power of pretend illness. It was my Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, but I had to be meticulous in how I used it. Yet what awaited me in that next class was worse than anything I could have imagined. Miss Cindy, the sleek and perky pony-tailed teenager who taught the class bounded over to me as soon as I came in. She knelt right down to my height and told me that since I missed a class, I wasn’t to worry one bit. She had her appointment book and was going to schedule a make-up class right then and there.
It was too much. The punishment didn’t fit the crime. One measly lie and now I was going to have to wear make-up. The injustice of it all!
Miss Cindy didn’t understand the tears that sprang from my eyes and wasn’t able to console me. Phone calls were made. My mother came to pick me up. I never told her why I wanted to quit ballet - it was my deep dark secret. If I’d learned anything from my older sister, to whom I looked (and still do) to unlock all of the secrets of the feminine mystique, it was that you were supposed to fight to wear make-up, not to avoid it.
Anna, however, has constructed her own “keepit box” in her room where she holds her most treasured possessions. Nail polish and lipgloss abound. It tickles me, in a kind of where do you come from? way. And it makes me proud as it’s a sign of her individuality, something all her own. And just as I stood alone in my non-girlish way, someone different, and I though, separate from my mother and sister, I don’t want this to open a chasm between us. So we celebrate it together, even if I can’t bring myself to prefer pink over black, and we figure it all out together.
I read an excerpt from Peggy Orenstein’s book Cinderella Ate my Daughter today and it gave me pause. She writes about the saturation of princess marketing that has taken over the little girl population and asks whether us mothers should be so glib as to indulge in it unquestioningly.
Is it possible that my celebration of Anna’s individuality that I have been marking with tiaras and Pinkalicious cupcakes is false? It may not be individuality at all, but the fact that the princesses got to her before I could pass on my own brand of un-girly girliness. Her personality has been co-opted by Disney before I could exert my own influence. Could Anna be a case of culture over both nature and nurture?
Check this out and tell me what you think: http://peggyorenstein.com/
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