Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank (3 page)

The girls, as you might expect, seem to be ahead of the game on things romantic. They prefer to play house during recess with designated “mommy,” “daddy,” and “baby” instead of the boys’ favorite, some sort of army-man, video-game soldier thing that involves lots of running around for no reason and screaming
“You’re my prisoner!” to
the pampas grass.

Not long ago, my daughter confided that one of the little boys in her class had threatened to kiss her on the playground. Apparently a romantic subplot had developed among the soldiers.

Because hubby and I are basically nerds, we considered this a “teachable moment” and launched a loving but firm and very PC lecture about not allowing anyone to do anything to you that you don’t like.

But then the truth came out.

“Well,” she said, “he didn’t really want to that much, but all of us girls chased him and finally caught him and he said he’d kiss us if we didn’t let him go.”

Ah, well, then. Carry on, soldiers. War does strange things to a man’s brain, I guess.

With so much romance in the air, the princess has been thinking about her own marital future. “I don’t think I’m
going to get married until
Vm fifteen,”
she announced at the dinner table one night.

Well, that’s a relief. We were afraid she was going to do something crazy.

“Where on earth will you live?” I asked.

“Well, here, of course,” she said. And the groom? “Well, he’ll have to go live with his mommy and daddy. After he gets a job and buys me some stuff.”

Okay, this might work out after all.

While Valentine’s Day is a favorite holiday around our house (how can anything dedicated to chocolate be bad?), it’s not as much fun as Halloween.

This year, we decided that the princess would be a cow-girl. It was so fabulously retro, I decided. You know. Fringed suede vest, maybe a ruffly denim skirt, red bandanna, hat, boots, and a little six-shooter.

Easy enough, I thought.

Because I am famously incapable of sewing (having sewn the pockets onto the inside of my final-exam apron back in seventh grade home ec class), it was going to have to be store-bought.

Our first stop was a famous toy store that has a backwards
R
in the middle.

“Where are your six-shooters, hon?” I asked the earnest-faced young man standing in the weapons aisle.

“Huh?”

“Toy pistols, hon. You know, maybe a couple of them
with a holster so Missy Poo here can be a proper cowgirl for Halloween.”

He looked at me with disdain. “We don’t carry guns here.”

“No, of course you don’t,” I said. “I want a
toy
gun. I’m sure y’all have those here at We Be Toys, don’t you?”

“No guns!” he kind of shrieked. The princess and I looked at each other, puzzled.

I tried logic. “But you’ve got machetes, tanks, and missile launchers right here,” I said. “What’s the big deal?”

“No guns!”

“Okay,” I said, using my best hostage-negotiator-calm voice. “I got the whole guns-kill-people thing, but what do you think is on the front of that huge green regulation army tank on the shelf behind you? Are those babies going to fire chocolate frosting onto the enemy? I think not.”

For reasons that I don’t come close to understanding, I have noticed that, the older I get, the more often I am prone to lapse into a pathetic middle-aged-white-woman attempt at rapper cool when extremely frustrated.

The first time it happened was when my cable went out and, therefore, my Internet connection. I had spent the whole day home alone with an inability to Google myself. Yes, I know it sounds nasty, but it’s more fun than a big bowl of meth. Kidding!

Any who, I heard myself tell the nice cable man, “Listen
bruh, you better MacGyver something quick, cuz I’m jonesin’ for my broadband.”

So, it was happening again in the toy store. Frustration leads to rap in me. Fo’ shizzle.

I eyed the sales boy. “Don’t you see, er, home slice, it’s the same thing? Except we want a six-shooter.”

“Look, it’s store policy not to carry them,” my vested friend said, hoping that someone, anyone, would page him. And soon.

“I feel ya, my face gator,” I said, again lapsing into this curious rapspeak and wondering why, even as I was saying it. “But I just want to make a point here. . . . I mean I’m up in here with my girl. I’m in the house and I got the Benjamins, so whassup?”

Alas, we finally accepted defeat, but only after I’d, I think, flashed some gang signs and announced “It’s all good” to no one in particular.

We got back into my ghetto sled and moved on to search for the costume components. Six stores and endless rap frustration later, the closest we’d come was something called Diva Cowgirl! It was a hideous hot pink shiny metallic skirt with a fringy top. Frankly, it looked like it would have been more at home in an Old West brothel, worn by one of those hoochie mamas you always saw hugging the bar at Miss Kitty’s saloon on
Gunsmoke.

Once again, I silently cursed the fact that I was a craft feeb.
Across town, my friend was busily stitching a VW Beetle costume, complete with working windshield wipers for her daughter.

Bitch.

We even stopped at the fabric store, where I thought I could buy some cow-print fabric and cut a little vest out.

“Mommy, what are you
doing?”
asked my daughter, horrified.

“It’s a pattern. Mommy can use this to make your Halloween costume. How hard can it be to make a vest?”

“Have you been drinking?”

Whoa. That hurt. Although it was a perfectly reasonable question.

That night, I discovered everything I wanted on eBay, the catch being that it would cost $150 or, with shipping, about $386.

The white sheet with cut-out eyeholes was starting to look really good.

But not good enough for the princess, who ended up borrowing a fabulous real suede cowgirl outfit from my friend Amy, who always comes through in a pinch.

Amy’s one of those friends who is relentlessly prepared for everything. So, in less time than it took for me to transform into Gangsta Mama, I had everything we needed, including a tiny little pearl revolver and matching holster.

We loved the cowgirl outfit so much that it became that year’s Christmas card.

My friend Mona, whose kid is not allowed to play with guns and therefore spends all day fashioning Uzis from bent pecan tree limbs, was horrified.

“Is that a gun in that holster?” she asked, incredulous.

“Well, hell yeah, Mona. She’d look pretty goofy wearing an empty holster, now, wouldn’t she?”

“You shouldn’t encourage that sort of thing,” she said while I watched her son turn a magnolia seedpod into an amazingly realistic grenade.

“Fire in the hole, y’all!” he hollered.

Once we got past the horrors of Halloween, there was scarcely time to take a breath before it was time for the annual Freeze Your Ass Off Fall Festival Fundraiser at school.

If you have a kid in elementary school, you know all about the Fall Festival, which is held to celebrate the old-time notion of “harvest.” This is a cute idea, I guess, but if you think about it, it’s not like any of these kids has brought in a crop or will ever contemplate going to the barn dance with a gal named Millie.

It is, however, an excuse to have fun and raise a little money, usually for the PTA, which I most certainly believe in and would never, ever say anything against on account of these people have more power in their pinkie toenail than I will ever have in my whole pathetic life. So, go PTA!

The Fall Festival, then, isn’t about celebrating a bounteous harvest. No, no. It is about finding the one dummy in
the planning session who says, “Sure! I’ll run the popcorn concession.”

Looking back on it, I was actually smug about my assignment. Let the rest of them run the bingo, the salmonella—er, petting zoo—or the thing I did last year: the throw-the-beanbag-through-the-clown’s-eyes until you either win a prize or burst into tears and scream
“Mean lady!”
and get
two
prizes and all the change in the mean lady’s pockets.

The popcorn concession, as it turned out, was a two-foot-tall glass box that said
Hot Popcorn
on it in happy red script. It was stashed on the floor of a broom closet and weighed approximately eighteen hundred pounds.

After a few minutes of huffing and puffing, I found Hans and Franz to help me tote the thing across the playground.

Okay,
I said, looking at the empty glass box,
start popping!
After a few wretched moments, I realized this was no microwave but rather some sort of Amish popcorn concession that used—get this—oil and actual popcorn kernels.

All alone at my post and surrounded by freckle-faced accusers who wanted to know when the popcorn would be ready, I decided to read the directions. Turns out you had to heat the thing for eight minutes. Next, you had to measure oil into the basket gizmo. Then (and here’s the tricky part) while the blasted thing rotated with tiny blades that stir the kernels, you had to dodge the blades to continually add kernels.

It was then that I realized that the proper name for this
particular corner of Fall Festival hell was Let’s Visit the Whirling Popcorn Machine of Death.

Burn, spatter, dodge, weave.

I finally managed to make my first sale, and the kid complained that the popcorn was burned.

“Yeah? Well, so am I. Get used to it.”

He looked hurt.

“Oh, all right. And here’s all the change in my pockets.”

We’d barely had time to take a breath after all the “fun” of the Fall Festival when my daughter announced plans for Thanksgiving.

As she sat in the backseat on the way to school, she solemnly examined her cuter-’n’-hell hot pink velour pantsuit.

“What’s wrong, pumpkin?” I said cheerily after seeing a definite frowny face in my rearview window.

“We were
supposed
to wear black dresses so we could be pilgrims today,” she said petulantly.

“Huh?” I asked, mildly irritated that the Allman Brothers classic “Blue Sky” had just come on the radio and, instead of listening to it, I must now discover that, through no fault of my own, I was pilgrim-deficient.

“You know, Mommy, for the Thanksgiving feast. You’re making the mashed potatoes and it’s at nine thirty and all the other mommies are going to be there and one of them’s even going to make
gravy!”

Okay, that hurts. Every kid in the neighborhood knows
that I make the worst gravy in seven states. It is notoriously thin and flavorless and is eventually tossed with great drama and some few tears onto the backs of lingering yard cats every danged Thanksgiving afternoon.

“Whoa,” I said, while the Brothers crooned about blue skies and sunny days and Lord knows what they’ll do if she takes her love away.

“Okay,” I said as calmly as possible. “A costume? You’re supposed to wear a costume?”

“Well, just a black dress, kind of pouffy, you know, like the Pilgrims wore to eat with the Native Americans.”

“Indians,” I growled.

“Mommy!”

Oh, spare me a PC grade-schooler. And why had I picked this morning to give up caffeine? Why hadn’t I given up, I dunno, maize instead?

“Honey,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me about this last week? You know Mommy needs a little more than (looks at watch), hmmm, thirty-six seconds’ notice.”

“There was a note in my backpack. Didn’t you read it?”

Busted. Okay, I admit it. There are so
many
notes that I may have missed a few. Late library books, homework sheets, Picasso-like artwork—I tell you, hons, some days I expect to pull a live squirrel monkey out of that thing.

OKAY, DO NOT PANIC, I thought. I thought it just like that, in capital letters. There was still, after all, twenty-two
seconds to return home and throw on the most somber and Pilgrim-like dress she had, and that’s what we did.

“Thee looks beautiful,” I said as we raced into the school, a ten-pound bag of potatoes slapping against my sweatpants.

“Thanks, Mommy,” she said with a bright smile. “Oh, and Mommy, don’t forget, I said you’d make the corny-copia.”

Thee is
so
grounded.

The princess had just graduated to a size 7 when everything went to shit. We headed for our favorite department store, ready to take that leap into the new world of 7–16. Bye-bye, 4–6X, I thought to myself with a tug of sadness. My baby was growing up.

And apparently into a prostitute.

“Where are the sevens?” I asked the sixty-something clerk who wore her glasses on a chain just like me.

“You’re standing in ‘em,” she said.

Oh, no,
I thought, looking around.
Oh no, no, no, no, no, no.

“There must be some mistake,” I said. “These are, well, slutty-looking. I’m talking about clothes for a little girl in first grade.”

“That’s all we got.”

“But these look like things
a hooker would wear!”

She smiled sadly. “You have no idea how many times I hear that every day.”

Okay, breathe. This is just some weird marketing experiment. Right?

I went to my second-favorite department store and was invited to peruse the awfulness that is Tweenland! A better name would be Lil Skanks!

Sequins, fringe, neon glitter tank tops with big red lips on them, fishnet sleeves, scary dragon faces lunging from off-the-shoulder T-shirts. Whither the adorable seersucker? The pastel floral short sets? The soft cotton dresses in little-girl colors like lavender, pale pink, periwinkle blue? This stuff practically screamed
SYRINGE SOLD SEPARATELY
.

I get it. Now that my kid is practically of childbearing age (is six the new seventeen?) I must choose from ripped-on-purpose jeans and T-shirts that scream things like
BABY DOLL
and
JAIL BAIT
, not to mention a rather angry
GIRLS
RULE
AND BOYS
DROOL
!
where an embroidered flower with buzzing bee should be.