Mary doesn’t like a ponytail.
She thinks that, with her hair pulled back from her face, she looks like a boy.
I love when her hair is swept up and wrapped into a bun. When her hair is down it hides her face and distracts from her fine features. She loves when I play with her hair, but when I pull it away from her face, she immediately scrunches her shoulders, “Moo-ooom!” She says as she shakes her hair loose.
We compromise with a side ponytail She likes how, when her ponytail is draped over her left shoulder, you can still see her long hair when you’re looking directly at her face.
“But no one just looks at your face!” I try to explain, echoing my own mother’s futile advice when I was a little girl, looking in the mirror and obsessing over pulling my hair back into a perfectly flat ponytail. My mom tried to explain to me that when I looked in the mirror I was just getting one view of myself. When other people looked at you they see a fuller, three-dimensional you. My mom’s advice to me then fell just as flat as my advice to Mary does now.
I will admit here — I secretly hope Mary notice other little girls in her class and be influenced by their style — french braids and space buns. They’re all so cute! And how are the other moms pulling this off? Are Mary and I the only mother and daughter having these battles over ponytails (and shorts, and cardigans). Certainly other daughters are won over by their mothers’ wisdom, affection, and of course their mature sense of style, right? “Why would mom send me out into the world looking anything other than my absolute best?” other people’s children think as they happily pull on the cardigan they didn’t want to wear, but will because their mother told them it was going to be chilly.
How DO people convince their children leave the house wearing French braids and saddle shoes?
Before soccer games, I encourage Mary to let me pull her hair into a side ponytail. I have to bite my tongue — literally, clamp my teeth onto my tongue — to keep me from saying, “Do you see Savannah’s ponytail? Doesn’t it look cute? Do you want me to do your hair like hers?”
I quiet my tongue because I can hear the underlying message — look to others for beauty. Don’t trust yourself. Ignore what feels good to you. Do not choose what makes you feel comfortable or confident. Do what everyone else is doing. Follow the crowd, and do it wearing a graphic t-shirt that says “Be Yourself.” After all, that kind of message is so in right now.
This is the same voice that tells me, “Oooh I love that shirt, but I could never pull it off.” It’s the voice that wonders what everyone else thinks of me when I show up in my running shorts and ponytail. This voice in my head has been working on it’s foothold for nearly four decades, and now it’s moving on to my daughter.
It’s difficult to figure out your personal style, isn’t it? There are so many messages, everywhere you look. Influence comes from the TV, friends, advertisements, your mom. It’s impossible to tune it all out. And then there’s the other influence — your actual preference. Amid all of the messaging, there are the things that you actually love, that you enjoy wearing. There is the dress that makes you feel beautiful and the side ponytail that helps you feel feminine while you’re on the soccer field, even though that’s something you can’t quite articulate.
Not yet, anyway.
My daughter has her very own sense of style, and I have no idea what informs it. She doesn’t read fashion magazines or follow any fashion influencers on social media. She certainly doesn’t listen to my advice, and from what I can tell, she doesn’t look to her peers for cues.
But it comes from somewhere. And my job isn’t to make sure she doesn’t make any blunders, but that she keeps listening to whatever voice is telling her what feels good and looks awesome to her.
Mary has always been like this. My first memory of her rejecting clothes is when she was 18 months old. I put cute Valentines’s Day overalls on her and she threw her body on the floor and screamed “BUT I LOOK LIKE A FARMER!!”
I used to hope she’d grow out of it, but I’m trying to change that perspective. I bet her opinions on ponytails will change. Maybe she’ll even say yes to a sweater one day. But I don’t want her to grow out of her confidence in what she likes and doesn’t like.
After all, there’s no rule that says you have to wear a ponytail if you’re playing soccer. And there’s DEFINITELY no rule about not wearing running shorts to a PTA meeting even though all the other moms are wearing heels.
