What a Girl Wants

My daughter just turned 13.  In case you missed the news. 


She's a great kid.  She is relatively level-headed and not much of a drama queen.  She is not too grown up. 


But she is a teenager now.  She wants to walk to the park down the hill with friends. By themselves.  She wants to shop in that great big mall all by herself with her friends.  She wants a Facebook account.  She wants to wear make-up.

The thought of make-up on my daughter used to cause me to feel a little bit sick to my stomach.  Too grown-up! She's beautiful the way she is - she does not need make-up! Now she's 13 and I realize that a little mascara is nothing compared to all the creeps in the world who might want to be her friend on Facebook. And all of those frightening nooks and crannies at the mall ... we'll take that eyeshadow in all colors possible, please. 

Plus, make-up is fun to girls of a certain age.  I have to remember that it used to be for me too.  It used to be  fun to spend my allowance on a shiny new lipstick. Now I get a q-tip and wrestle every last smudge out of a 10 year old tube of Clinque lip gloss that was the bonus accompanying the foundation I used to wear 10 years ago.  I decided to let my daughter experience that same old junior high make-up fun.  Besides, at this point, if I say no to make-up, we all know there will be a secret stash in her BFF's locker that she will apply every day before the homeroom bell. 


This kid is cautious and moderate.  She was chattering to me about the goings on of a recent slumber party where the girls were all doing each other's faces up, and she mentioned that she thought several of her friends wear too much make-up.  "It doesn't look good," she confessed, "and when they put it on me, it looked awful."


Today, I arranged for little sister to stay with Dad (imagine not wanting your precocious 6 year old sister who is not good in Target to accompany you on your first cosmetics purchase!) and she and I went to get some new make-up for her.  And some junk food for dinner tonight.  We girls were having a little party of sorts.  She made some nice choices.  A pretty palette of shadow for blue eyes, and some mascara of the clear variety.  Her friends already purchased her some tinted lip gloss. And she decided that face make-up might clog her pores even more.

After the junk food fest (ohh, bad idea I am so paying for at the moment) and movie, little sis went to bed and she and I pulled out the new make-up and practiced.  She looked really nice.  Not made-up at all.  And then we had a friendly little Just Dance competition.  Let's just say ...  Can't Touch This! ;) And we talked about all kinds of things that 13 year olds want to talk about. 


The decision to bestow my blessing upon the make-up wearing of my eighth grader may come with the kind of judgment I used to get in Meijer when I let my littlest get one of those movie carts. (Grocery store peace was so worth a dollar and some stink eye!)  Honestly, I don't think she is learning anything damaging.  She knows that I am not of the persuasion that a woman does not walk out of the house with a fully made-up face. She knows that for me, make-up is a sometimes thing.  It's for dressing up.  Sometimes I put on just a little when I am dressing professionally.  I hope I'm sending the message that make-up is not something I or any other female needs to be attractive. 

I have mentioned before that in mothering, one constantly reinvents oneself.  Or maybe, more accurately, evolves.  You learn which battles you want to fight, and that you certainly can't fight them all.  You realize that you really can't keep your baby in a bubble. You begin to learn to trust your gut, and your kid who is, amazingly, maturing quite nicely. You learn not to beat yourself up over everything and stop taking yourself so seriously.  There is "ideal" and there's "real," and along the way we begin to detect the difference between the two. 

I am not a perfect mother.  Not even be a great mother.  I have a good 13 year old daughter (and a 6 year old one too), though.  And tonight was a blast.  We weren't eating organic, nutritious, wholesome food.  We were rotting out our minds in front of a TV screen.  We were indulging in a vain activity that might send the message that girls need to make themselves attractive to others. And we loved every minute of it.  Bonding with daughters is so worth selling out and getting some stink eye;)