Daughters

I was getting ready for an evening out with friends when Bean, who was happily destroying shampoo bottle villages with her soap-bar dinosaur, looked up and said, “Mama, you put on makeup so Daya thinks you pretty?” *Daya is what she called her daddy before she could speak like a human being…and then it just kinda stuck.*

I’m really not that big on makeup and my first instinct was to tell her to bite her prissy little tongue because Mama doesn’t work that hard to look pretty for no man! But instead I went back to painting my face with chemical laden acceptance and tried to look all casual and non-hypocritical as I asked her, “Honey, is that why you think Mama wears makeup?”

“Yeeees…” Translation: Duh, Mother, is that not what I JUST SAID?

 I pressed on. “Okay. Is that why you think all ladies wear makeup?”

“Mmmhmm”

“Really? And what makes you think that?”

She stares at me incredulously. I take that as a cue to continue and say something along the lines of:

“What I’m trying to say, Baby, is that things like makeup and nice clothes are not always about people thinking you’re pretty. A lot of grown-ups, like mama, wear those things because it makes them feel happy. Ya know, I don’t always wear makeup and I think I’m pretty without it too,” (and if your daddy likes the fact that I seldom burn meals anymore it would be in his best interest to agree) “I just like to put it on sometimes.”

Call me naïve but this is honestly a topic I didn’t expect to discuss in any great detail until she was a little closer to the double digits. But hey, times is diff’rnt now. There are Dora the Explorer themed cosmetics on the market and my toddler and I could get matching bikinis if we wanted to.  Her peers are in the news because their beauty-obsessed pageant moms are taking them in to have their bodies spray tanned and their eyebrows waxed…and the preschoolers who aren’t having sexualization shoved down their throats are being overworked and groomed for their Ivy League futures.

The other day Bean- who just turned three, mind you- had to demonstrate for me how her aunt’s iPhone works. I was all, “Um, excuse me wonder child of the millennia, shouldn’t we be turning cartwheels or jumping on the couch or something??”  My child’s generation may be all kinds of smart and pretty in the future but if you think the psychiatric business is a-boomin now you just wait.

There’s a quote by Melissa Wardy, an entrepreneurial mom who fashioned the Pigtail Pals brand for young girls, that I think is kind of amazing: “A girl cannot become a woman, in the truest and most soulful sense of the word, if she has not been allowed a girlhood. Exploration, education, and empowerment will make our daughters the women of tomorrow.”

 Without a proper childhood, our kids are not going to have a solid foundation to launch from. There is a reason for the phrase “never a child, always a child”. When circumstance comes into play that is one thing but when we are the catalyst for negative social change in our children then it’s time to wake the hell up people take a step back and ask ourselves: Are we raising our children or jerking them up into adulthood?