I've realized that Dee Dee has had the spotlight in my
recent blogs. This one goes out to my littlest girl, Sylvie.
Like most families I know, we've been blessed with loads of
wonderful hand-me-downs. Over the last two and a half years, we have worked our
way through box after bag of passed along clothing and shoes. The girls’closet
is full of more shoes than I have probably owned in my lifetime. Tennis shoes
with pink lights that flash at ever step, purple crocs, felted Mary Janes,
Berkenstock-style sandals, sports sandals, flowery sandals. They have about as
many dresses, but I can count on my fingers the number of times they have
actually worn any of them. On the surface of things, it has simply never been
the right time. They were winter babies, wearing fleece onsie over cotton onsie
day after chilly day. Then, when they were crawling, dresses seemed absurdly
impractical, their chubby knees pinning the skirt to the floor, immobilizing
them. As toddlers, it was no better. They'd trip over their hems, get hung up
climbing into the car or stroller, splatter the front of an otherwise
immaculate dress with yogurt or tomato sauce. And so, with few exceptions,
their plethora of dresses has remained, neatly folded, in the bottom drawer of
their dresser.
Until now. Now the girls insist on picking out their own
clothes. I pull open their drawers for them. "OK," I tell them.
"Pick a shirt. Now pick some pants." They have never, ever, ever
looked as well-dressed as so many young children do, but if Dee Dee wants to
wear a pink shirt with striped orange pants, well, honestly, I couldn't care
less. At least she's dressed, after all, which these days, especially, is not
something to take for granted.
Then, a few days ago, Sylvia pulled open the bottom drawer,
the one with the dresses.
"I want to wear this one!" she announced, holding
up a pretty white sundress with different colored buttons all down the
front.
"Okay," I said, and pulled it over her head,
wondering if it would fit her. That drawer hadn't been opened in almost a
year.
She looked down at herself, smoothing the front of the
dress, touching the colorful buttons.
"I'm a little girl," she said in her cute little
sing-song voice. "I'm a little girl."
It is not the first time she has said that. In fact, pretty
much any time Sylvia picks out a particularly girly-looking
shirt—like the one with the glittery purple tutu that says, "All girls
love shoes!"—she says it. This is in contrast to most other times, when
she says things like "I'm a ghost!" or "I'm Shaggy!" Almost
always, these things are said with a tone of exasperated defiance, as in:
"Come on, Sylvia!"
"I'm Shaggy!"
Or:
"Hurry up, baby girl.”
"I'm a ghost!"
But, "I'm a little girl" she says with a note of
somewhat amazed satisfaction. It's not that I can't relate. The other night I
got dolled up for the YWCA's annual fundraising Black and White Gala. In the
ten minutes I had to get ready, I painted my toenails and inexpertly applied
foundation and eye shadow. I honestly think I might have had both since I was a
teenager, and since I so rarely wear make-up, I feel like a teenager
when I'm putting them on, wondering if people will notice that I have
absolutely no idea what I'm doing, like my best friend in seventh grade did.
“You didn’t put it on right,” she told me scornfully as we
walked to the bus stop one day. She had a very knowledgeable older sister, so
she knew about things like eye shadow. “You have to use two colors. Like this.”
She pointed to her own expertly made-up eyes. That was over twenty-five years
ago, but to this day I cannot wear eye shadow without feeling like a make-up
wearing impostor.
I put on some lipstick, pulled on my dress and some fancy jewelry
I picked up at a clothing swap, opted for the comfortable sandals instead of
the heels. And even though my hair hadn't been cut in eight months and my
make-up was surely wrong, when I looked in the mirror, I felt a little of the
same pleasant surprise I imagine Sylvia does when she sees herself in her
girly-wear. "Wow. I'm a girl!"
I'm a girl. Having two
girl toddlers, the question of what it means to be a girl is constantly
swirling in the air around us. After weeks of wanting to be Daphne, Sylvia has
abandoned that character in our on-going Scooby Doo role-play. Now, Sylvia is
Shaggy, Dee Dee is Freddy, I'm Scooby, and Clayton is the monster. I'm
constantly mixing up my pronouns when I talk to them, saying things like
"Shaggy needs to hurry. She needs to get in his car seat."
"Why do they want to be boys?" Clayton wants to
know. "They're girls!"
"They're just pretending," I tell him, but, like
him, I wonder. When I was little, I always wanted to be a boy, too. Boys didn't
have to wear dresses, or sneak shorts under the skirts they were made to wear
to school. And although in elementary school, I could beat all the boys but
one, I had a sense of myself as an anomaly among my female classmates. Maybe I
could run fast, but most girls couldn't, or didn't care to; girlhood, in the
way that I understood it then, did not merit my respect. Even as a girl myself,
"being a girl" was nothing to aspire to.
Then there's the fact that Scooby Doo, even in its most
recent incarnations, seems mired in an outdated sexism. In one especially awful
episode, Freddy gets caught up in a winch. "Oh, what do I do,
Freddy?" a helpless Daphne asks. Even smarty-pants Velma gives up without
trying. "Mechanics aren't my forte," she confesses. The answer: go
get a man, even if the only one available is hapless Shaggy. It's no wonder to
me that my girls don't want to be the female characters. Even though they've
only seen the show a handful of times, I'm not surprised they're not dying to
be either air-headed Daphne or know-it-all Velma.
It wasn't until I went to college that my disparagement of girlhood
began to shift, even as I became almost immediately indoctrinated that the very
word girl was taboo, carrying as it did the implicit sexism of centuries of
inequality. (My favorite cartoon from that era was of a proud father looking
into a crib. "It's a woman!" he says. "A baby woman!")
Suddenly, girl/womanhood was no longer represented by the mall-loving,
boy-crazy, gossip-spreading girly-girls who cared only about how to apply eye shadow.
Suddenly, being a woman meant being smart and strong and comfortable in one's
skin—and one’s body hair. It meant being competitive and ambitious in the
world, but affirming and supportive of one's fellow woman. Whereas until then I
had felt proud to be a different from most girls, for the first time I felt
proud to be one.
Looking back, I wonder why that shift felt so drastic. Even
in high school, I had plenty of strong female role-models. My mom was brilliant
and nurturing. My best friends' moms were self-sufficient and independent and
successful. My older sister was smart and athletic, whose impressive feats,
both academic and on the track, I struggled to keep pace with. My best friend
was just like me; we recognized each other as kindred spirits during the first
warm-up lap at basketball practice, so determined were we both to come in
first. But somehow my conception of what it meant to be girly, i.e, a girl, did
not stretch to include these people I admired. And although I was outraged—and
baffled—when my calculus teacher told our all-female math team that girls were
just not as good at math, my vision of girlhood had remained, for the most
part, derisive and uninspiring.
It came as something of a relief,
then, to go to college and come across a different way of conceptualizing womanhood,
however sophomoric our ideas. For, after all, we were the children of the
second wave of feminists; our world was very different from the one in which our
parents had come of age. As girls, we had always been expected to excel as much
as our brothers. We had access to reliable birth control. We had never doubted
that the world was ours.
And yet, we found things to be
outraged by. I scolded my father for calling his office workers “girls,” found misogyny even in the lines of my beloved Robert Frost. Before, eye shadow had
seemed to me merely trivial and superficial; now it took its place in the
myriad of ways that women were objectified and thus belittled.
Once, while my college boyfriend and I were visiting his
family in upstate New
York , he scoffed at
an ad in his younger sister's magazine. The ad pictured three young girls,
laughing with their arms around each other. His exact point, I do not remember.
It was probably something about the ways in which gender is constructed by
society; the ad was teaching girls to be tender and nurturing, for God's sake!
I remember his father looking at his self-righteous son with confusion,
gesturing at the picture.
"But this—this ability to be close to each other, to
be loving and emotional—this is what is
wonderful about girls!"
His dad's perspective has stayed with me. There's nothing
wrong with loving and emotional. For that matter, there's nothing wrong with
eye shadow either. If we deride any quality we identity as feminine in the name
of equality, it seems we have fallen prey to our own latent sexism.
I am guilty of it, myself. When I first learned I was to
have daughters, I was nervous. What if they're girly-girls? I thought. What if
they want to hang out at the mall, or be cheerleaders? What if, in other words,
they're the kind of girl that made me think so little of being one myself?
I haven't ruled out this possibility, but somehow it makes
me less nervous. When the girls pick out their shoes from the overflowing
cardboard boxes in their closet, Dee Dee wants her running shoes. Sylvia picks
out the sparkly silver slippers with the flowers. Maybe her tastes are her own,
but I don't rule out our influence either. "Look how nice you look,"
her dad tells her. Or, "Come on, let's go show Ms. Devon your sparkly
shoes," I say, when I'm trying to hurry her out of the car at the
gym.
The other day, I said to her, "You're a pretty girl,
Sylvia." Because she is! She is ridiculously cute, with her little round
face, almond-shaped eyes, and golden hair. As soon as I'd said it, I felt
guilty. What if she grows up thinking that pretty is all she is, or that it's
the most important thing? "You're a good girl," I added quickly.
"You're funny and smart."
"How is she smart?" Clayton wanted to know. I
hesitated. It's true that Sylvia is not as precocious as her sister. She wasn't
counting to sixteen at two-years-old, doesn't recite books almost verbatim
after hearing them read once. I could explain to him about Gardner 's theory of multiple intelligences, how, when it comes to
interpersonal intelligence, Sylvia takes after her grandmother and namesake,
who, in my father's words, "could talk to a stone." Like my mother,
Sylvia charms people easily. Although less out-going than Dee Dee in so many
respects, when it comes to people, she is the one to reach out and to bond. She
holds out her arms for all her grown-up friends, gets scooped up and
adored.
The other day, I sent Sylvia to her room after dinner,
since she wouldn't stop her high-pitched screech. ("Could you just try for
an octave lower," Don suggested. "Like this: Aaawwwhhh!") When I
opened the door a few minutes later, she was standing on the bottom drawer of
the dresser, her baby doll on the changing table, washing its face with a wipe
as she sang it a little song.
"You've got to see this!" I whispered to Don, so
of course Clayton comes running. Our ooh-ing and awing isn't lost on him.
He's sees his little sister's nurturing side, sees the value we give it. The
other day the two of them played together in the living room with Sylvia's baby
doll. "Now she's hungry," he told her. "She wants mama's milk.
And you're the mama, so you have to give it to her, like this," he
instructed, positioning the baby in front of her chest. Later, Sylvia found
half of a plastic Easter egg shaped like a hippo. She sat down outside the
van and cradled it in her arms, gently swaying back and forth, and began to
sing "Rock-a-bye Baby."
"Mom!" Clayton said. "Sylvia's being really
sweet to her hippo!"
In his voice there's genuine appreciation, the same
admiration I feel when I see her tend to her baby or love on our pets. Sylvia
is very, very sweet.
In college, I would have scoffed at sweet. Why do girls
have to be sweet? As a girl, I always hated that rhyme about sugar and spice
and everything nice, as if girls were nothing more than life-size, cloying
cookies. Even now, I'm way too much a feminist to deny the dangers of the
feminine ideal, that model of docile, sweet-natured beauty that the first wave
of feminists fought so hard to disarm. And yet, I can't help but see Sylvia's
nurturing spirit as feminine and wonderful.
I'm reminded of another college experience. My first day on
campus, I briefly met a beautiful girl—um, I mean, woman—with long blond hair
and sexy cowboy boots. She appeared to be everything that I would have liked to
be: gorgeous and confident, smart and sexy. Two years later, I met her again.
She was now an out lesbian, and very butch. I wondered about her
transformation, about why in discovering her love of women she'd felt the need
to let go of the striking femininity I had so admired in her before.
She seemed to read my thoughts. "My mother wants to
know why I can't look more like a girl," she said. "I try to get her
to understand. There are lots of ways to be a girl."
Even to this day, I want to holler "Yes!" when I
think of her words. Because, in a nutshell, that's it. There are simply lots of
ways to be a girl. Girls can have long hair, or short hair. Girls can wear eye shadow,
or not, or just try their best to sort-of wear it once in a while. Girls can
wear the running shoes or the sparkly slippers. They can build towers out of
blocks like Dee Dee, or sing songs to potatoes, rocking them in their arms, like
Sylvia.
In a way, I think having a daughter who might just turn out
to be a little bit like the girly girl I once disparaged is teaching me
something I wish I'd known long ago, when I was sneaking shorts on under my
skirts and secretly wishing I'd been a boy: It's okay to be a girl. And not
just okay—it’s great. Because there are just so many ways to be one. Thanks,
Sylvie.
