I Actually Envy "That Kid Who Farted Each Day During Story Time"

This morning, I faced one of those delicate parenting situations that I dislike. The Princess, having successfully dressed and brushed her teeth and whatnot, finished her morning by brushing her hair. All good so far. Then she tried to put a braid in her hair that involved the hair wrap she got at Disney (the thing where they wrap string around a small patch of hair, add a few beads, and then charge you the price of a small, foreign car for it), with the end result making her hair bunch and gather and basically look like that of a wild woman.

Now she was pretty proud of herself, and I didn't want to hurt her feelings, but I could not in good conscience let this go. See, as a youth I was left pretty unaware of anything by way of fashion sense. This is bad, but the fact is that my mother, who was responsible for selecting clothing for me, had some questionable habits, really pushed it into weird territory.

First, my mother had this habit of buying painter pants for me. This alone isn't offensive (although I still think it's odd that I didn't actually own a pair of jeans until late middle school). The issue was that she bought them in colors that do not flatter...well anyone. Serously, I wore plaid pants to my first three years of elementary schools. Multiple kinds of plaid. Plurals of plaid. Years later, when I run into people from that town (it's only that we moved that allowed me to achieve a decent social life), they honestly only remember me as "the kid with the plaid pants". Nice.

Now this alone could be overcome assuming that at some point I took up golf, which is the only socially acceptable excuse for plain pants so far as I can tell, but things got worse. See, she bought most of my clothes from the local Goodwill. I'm not sure why she had an obsession for Goodwill, but she did. As a result, I frequently ended up with an odd assortment of clothes that others had gotten rid of. Oh sure, some of them were disposed of because someone had grown out of them, but some were clearly a decision based on something more fashion oriented. Anyway, it resulted in things like me being the only kid I knew in a used, red Micheal Jackson jacket long after there was even a potential for such a thing to be cool.

So yeah, I feel the need to protect my daughter from this kind of thing. It's not that I want her to think that the way you look is the most important thing in the world. At the same time, it's disingenuous to pretend that you're not going to get judged on it by some people, and just working from my own experience, I can tell you the following is true:



Seriously, it's a wonder I didn't get beat up more often than I did.