At
our house we do not do Princess.
The
girls possess zero tiaras, zero plastic high-heeled shoes, zero polyester
Disney gowns in ghastly Easter egg hues. I’m the only family member who can
nominally distinguish between Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty. If
you were created after 1990, I haven’t got a clue.
As
graduates of progressive Quaker colleges and inhabitants of liberal (oftentimes
drearily so) Seattle, my husband and I are disinclined to foist the standard
commercial gendered crap on our kids. Happily, our girls are still young enough
we have final say over what comes into the house and, more significantly, what
leaves in a giant Goodwill-bound garbage bag in the wee hours of morning.
The
three-year-old does have friends, however, and attends preschool and generally
exists in the world. She’s been to the mall, attended birthday parties, scoped
stuff out on the internet. She’s been exposed to many a (toddler-sized) ball gown and is not herself any kind of tomboy.
She loves getting dressed in the morning, taking great time and care in
selecting her outfit, which more often than not involves a dress or twirly
skirt, tights in some contrasting color and pattern, legwarmers in yet another
color/pattern, and, on a particularly cold day, a pair of legwarmers on her
arms as well. She adores accessories—beaded necklaces, bangly bracelets,
sequined barrettes, hair bands adorned with flowers and hot-pink stripes.
Girlfriend’s got style.
The
other day she came up to me wearing a sundress over a long-sleeved t-shirt and
announced, “I’m going to go put on a different dress so I can be more
beautiful.” When I offer her a swipe of my sparkly lip gloss, her face lights
up the way mine would if you gave me a lifetime supply of the stuff. We are plenty
girly—it’s just that I like to think we enact our girliness in our own less
commercial (certainly less Disney) way.
I
find princesses—both royal and fairy (a distinction seldom made, weirdly, given
that one exists in reality and one has magical powers and wings)—to be cloying,
passive, prissy, shallow and beneath all that glitter and sheen, oh so
heteronormatively dull. But if my daughters were totally into them, I’d get
over my distaste and bestow upon my girls whatever tacky accessories they
required. I’d find a way to embrace Bell or Belle or whoever she is because I
love my children and want them to be their own people with their own
preferences and aesthetics and gender expressions and dress-up-clothes
collections and ideas of what’s beautiful. Even if they're radically different
from mine.
So
far we’re in the clear. The princess kingdom has remained invisible. For
Halloween the three-year-old elected to dress up as a cat, and for her birthday
she wanted the theme to be “purple.” Her favorite things are chocolate chip
cookies, the number eight, and her gender-bending stuffed cat (“Is Elliott a
boy cat or a girl cat?” “She’s a boy. Where’s his dress? She needs it for the
dance party.”). (The baby is too preoccupied with chewing on things—pretend
fruit, plastic cars, a wrapped stick of butter, my boob—to be concerned with
tulle and tiaras.)
When
my mother-in-law gave the three-year-old a giant book of stickers—a page of
cats and dogs, a page of farm stuff, a page of trees and birds, a page of
cut-out-dolls and clothing—my daughter gleefully used them up making elaborate
"This is the sister and this is her cat and they don't like the horse but
the horse is eating this thingy—what's it called?—oats, and they live in this
tree, and the birds sing, do you hear the birds, Mama?" scenes on sheets
of glittery silver paper. When she was "all done" with the
stickers—after months of use—there were three pages left untouched: a page of
ballerinas, a page of fairies, and a page of princesses.
And,
yeah, I’m not ashamed to admit it: this made me very happy. I might even have
done self-satisfied little dance before tossing the remaining stickers in the
Goodwill bag.
I
know I can’t shelter my daughter from Princessland forever. Every time she gets
a party invitation featuring some obsequious cartoon girl in a 1980s-prom-style
dress and a crown atop her age-inappropriate updo, I assume it’s the beginning
of the end. How can she resist the lure of sparkles and sequins and pastel
dresses? And why would she?
The
other day we attended her best friend’s birthday party. After two hours of
castles and knights and horses and princess craft projects and princess
cupcakes and princess garlands and princess balloons and princess party guests,
we were sent home with a princess bag full of princess stickers, a princess
bracelet, and a princess wand. She was quite taken with the wand. She carried
it around for the rest of the day, waving it in her sister’s face, tormenting
the cat, and generally making me nervous for everyone’s eyeballs.
“I
live in the castle,” she announced, wandering into the kitchen as her dad and I
made dinner.
“Oh?”
her dad said, raising his eyebrows at me as if to say, “Shit. Here we go.”
“Yeah,
I live in the castle with Elliott. And I have this wand.”
“Why
do you have a wand?” I asked.
“Because,”
she replied in a perfectly even tone. “I’m the queen.”
And
the baby?
“She’s
the king.”
If
you’re going to be royalty, why not aim for the top? A princess is just another
pretty girl in a hoop skirt, but the queen is sort of a badass—she’s
got clout. (Not to mention the king.)
And
if nothing else, the queen gets to raise the princess and try—gently!—to mold
her into the kind of woman she’s (secretly) most excited for her to be.
photo courtesy panso, morgueFile
