A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity

Kathleen Gilles Seidel

St. Martin’s Press   
   New York

Our darling little babies turned
into teenagers overnight.

It happened Labor Day weekend, right before the kids started sixth grade. One of the families with a swimming pool was having a party, and I was expecting the sort of event that this family had hosted a number of times before—invite the whole grade and let the kids splash around like happy little unisex puppies. Then my daughter, Erin, changed clothes three times, dashed across the street to lend her friend a shirt, and got six phone calls in thirty minutes.

She now stood at the railing of our wide front porch waiting for her ride. I had never imagined that my sweet child could look so ultrateen. Her dELiA’s denim miniskirt rode low on her narrow hips, her tangerine Old Navy flip-flops showed off brightly polished toenails, and her white Express tank top emphasized the glow of her summer tan and the swell of her new, little breasts. She looked healthy, confident, and even—oh, lord—a little sexy.

I had one consolation. I knew that underneath this studied, teenaged ensemble she had on little-girl Limited Too underpants, which were waist-high white cotton and decorated with pink flying pigs. At least we weren’t shopping for underwear at Victoria’s Secret.

The midafternoon sun was still above the trees. When Erin’s ride arrived, she launched herself down the front steps and across the yard. Her flip-flops slapped against her feet as she ran, and her shadow, slanting long across the grass, danced as she waved to her friends in the car.

My name is Lydia Meadows. I’m married with two kids, and we live in Washington, D.C., in a neighborhood with beautiful trees and three too many embassies, so that just when you are dashing madly to get home to pick up a forgotten pair of soccer cleats, one of the embassies is giving a party. This means you run into clogged streets, orange traffic cones, and hired parking valets who want you either to leave your car with them or to turn around and get back on the main road, which you don’t want to do because you and the soccer cleats don’t live on the main road, but on one of the neighborhood streets beyond the embassy.

My three closest friends have daughters who are my daughter’s three closest friends. We live in the same neighborhood, and our kids go to the same school. Because we are always running into people we know while shopping in little stores with wrought-iron bistro tables on the sidewalks, our lives have a pleasant small-town feel. It is a completely bogus feeling—what small town has a dELiA’s, an Old Navy, an Express, and a Limited Too, to say nothing (and, indeed, our kids do say nothing) of Congress and the White House? Our neighborhood is a theme-park version of a small town, but having grown up in an actual small town, I like the theme park better.

My daughter’s new teenaged thing continued through the rest of Labor Day weekend; the phone rang continually. On Monday, in hopes of making my five-foot-three self look taller, I put on a cotton sweater that was the same shade of bottle green as my twill slacks. Since my eyes are greenish and I had used freckle-avoidance sunscreen faithfully this summer, I thought I looked pretty good. Erin, however, took one look at me and moaned, “Oh, Mom, you
match,
” as if that were some kind of biblical sin. An hour later she asked if she could get her hair highlighted.

She is eleven years old. She isn’t getting her hair highlighted.

She and her friends go to the Alden School, a small academically oriented private school with a specialty in music. It used to be a prim all-girls school—it was founded at the turn of the previous century under the delicious name of “Miss Alden’s School”—and in those days the students wore uniforms. About fifteen years ago financial woes forced the school to become coed, and the uniforms have been replaced by a dress code that is Byzantine in its complexity. Students may not wear blue denim, but black denim is acceptable. Open-toed shoes may be worn as long as the shoe has a strap wrapping around the back of the ankle. Shirts must have a collar, but girls may wear jewel-necked shirts as long as the neck edge is finished with a contrasting trim or a faggoting or other decorative stitch. “Faggoting or other decorative stitch” is actually a phrase in the official dress code. Fortunately my husband and I are both lawyers, and so with our combined legal training and my knowledge of garment construction techniques—I sew and so unlike most people I do know what a faggoting stitch is—we are able to keep our children in compliance with the dress code. I can’t imagine how other families do it.

Erin’s first-day-of-school outfit Tuesday morning didn’t comply with the spirit of the dress code, but when she came down the back stairs into the kitchen, I could spot no technical violations. She was wearing a little cotton-fleece drawstring skirt and a white collared blouse that was suitably tucked into the skirt’s waistband. But the blouse was unbuttoned and beneath it she was wearing a turquoise tank top. The principal of the middle school was not going to like the extent to which the skirt resembled athletic wear, but fortunately we had a new headmaster this year, and I felt sure he would not form a committee for the purpose of adding to the dress code a prohibition against cotton-fleece drawstring skirts.

Private schools can be spectacularly absurd in their attention to detail.

The school is housed on the grounds of an old estate near Sibley Hospital. The high school and the administrative offices are in the seedily grand white mansion, which faces a broad, green lawn that we have not yet turned into a soccer field. Sloping behind the mansion are wooded grounds whose trees soften the lines of the two modern buildings that house the lower school and the middle school.

Normally my friends and I carpool to the kids’ many activities with a schedule that makes both the school’s dress and the nation’s tax codes look straightforward, but on the first day of school each family takes and picks up its own children. So in the afternoon I parked on a neighborhood street—rules governing the formation and behavior of automobiles in the carpool line take up two and a half pages of the school handbook—followed a well-worn path through the trees, and emerged into the rear parking lot that was between the lower- and the middle-school buildings.

In good weather the students wait for their rides outside, and I could see my seven-year-old son on the lower-school playground in the midst of some sort of controlled seven-year-old rowdiness. I waved to him and then turned to the middle school to look for Erin.

Although this was not specified in the handbook, the eighth graders always wait for their rides near the big oak tree, the seventh graders take over the steps, and the sixth graders are on the blacktop. I didn’t see Erin at first, but as I moved closer to the blacktop, I spotted her in the middle of a group of sixth-grade girls.

Indeed she and her three closest friends—the daughters of my three closest friends—were right in the middle of the group, and they were dressed virtually identically in these sweatpants-like skirts, unbuttoned but tucked-in white blouses, and vividly colored tanks. The other girls, none of whom had on this precise combination of garments, were hovering around the four of them. The farther a girl was standing from our four, the less animated she was.

If I hadn’t known better, I would have said that my daughter and her friends were the popular girls.

Erin? Popular?

I had been a smart girl in the middle of Indiana. There was no way that I had been popular. I had had my place, I hadn’t been a complete outcast, but on a normal day I had felt that every other girl in the school—at least among those worth thinking about—was prettier and better dressed. So I certainly wanted my daughter to feel better about her clothes and her friends than I had. I didn’t want her to feel as if she didn’t belong. I didn’t want her to be the one standing at the edge of a group, not knowing whom to talk to. I didn’t want her to feel left out, but I had never expected her to be
popular.

Popular girls were manipulative little blond bitch-goddesses. Erin’s hair was an unhighlighted brown.

I saw my friend Mimi coming across the parking lot. Her daughter, Rachel, was also wearing the drawstring skirt, white blouse, and bright tank.

I met her halfway and asked, “Were you popular in school?”

“Are you kidding?” She gestured toward herself. She was short, Jewish, and overweight. She did a great job of putting herself together; her dark hair was short and spiky, and she was not afraid to use her breadth as a canvas. Some days she was a walking art gallery. Today her jacket was hand-painted silk, with cascades of vermilion lilies and lime accents. Her jewelry was richly colored fused-glass pieces from the artists at the Glen Echo studios. She had perfect skin: flawlessly smooth without a single freckle or acne scar. I like thinking about texture, and so I had encouraged her to emphasize the loveliness of her skin by wearing smooth, finely woven fabrics. She had taken my advice and so her clothes and scarves floated around her with a wonderful liquidness. You would no more ask whether she looked fat than you would ask that about the Capitol. But she couldn’t have had such confidence in her teen years.

I pointed toward the girls, wondering if she saw what I did.

She did. “Holy crap.” Mimi shook her head, looked at me, her dark eyebrows arched in surprise, and then looked back at the girls. “I would have never expected this.”

“Me neither.”

“This explains why Rachel won’t talk to me anymore. The popular girls never talked to
me.
”

In the seventy-two hours since discovering that my daughter was a teenager, I had read about forty thousand books on parenting teenaged girls. I wasn’t sure how much they were going to help. One had suggested that if my daughter became pregnant, we should first decide who had ownership of the issue. I have no idea what I would do in such a situation—Erin hadn’t started menstruating yet—but a calm discussion of who “owned” the issue probably wouldn’t happen right off. Another book had warned me to be aware of the “dark side” of raising a child in an affluent home; apparently extreme anxiety about being thrown in the poorhouse builds character.

If you believe these books, teenaged girls are confused, anxious, depressed, and destructive. We need to teach our daughters how to identify their pain, the source of which is skinny fashion models, high-achieving parents, and above all else, popular girls.

Popular girls shatter the self-esteem of other girls; they persecute outsiders, they torment, tease, bully, exclude, and scapegoat. The books were full of advice on how to arm your child against these Queen Bees, but none of the books, not a one, said what you should do if your own child was popular.

Erin looked pretty and happy as she stood in that crowd of girls, and frankly, that made me feel good. I was glad that she was happy. I had worked hard to have her be happy. Chattering away, she was gesturing with her arms, her body moving freely. If her back was turned toward one child, a moment later she was facing that child with her back to someone else. She didn’t seem to be torturing anyone to establish her own status.