"I'm a little girl!"

I've realized that Dee Dee has had the spotlight in my recent blogs. This one goes out to my littlest girl, Sylvie. 

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            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.