Daughters | Modern Mommy Madness

This girl is turning one on Saturday, and I have so many questions. How did a year pass by so quickly? How did we manage to survive it?

I was terrified each time I gave birth. Of dying, of something going wrong, but mostly of surviving the day-to-day of managing the newborn in addition to whatever else was going on in our house. I worried myself sick before I had each of the boys, but by the time Penelope Rose was born I was beginning to learn the art of low expectations.

This year, I have started to fine-tune it.

Somehow all of the sudden my baby won’t sit still; I find her looking longingly at the living room cabinet that her brothers hide in, wishing she could hide in it too. She copies their monster sounds and dragon roars. When they cry, she cries. When they yell, she yells.

When she smiles, we all do.

Now, look.

I’m a girl’s girl. I have a lot of close girlfriends that I’m pretty sure I’d die without because I’m the kind of person who has a need to discuss. But on the whole, women are horrible creatures. The hood way to say that, because we all know I’m an expert on urban vocabulary, is bitches be *cray.

If I were to tell you all the cray that bitches have thrown at me over the past 34 years it would bring us all down, so I’m going to avoid rehashing. Just know that I know cray. Also, for some reason random strangers have always felt like it was acceptable for them to comment on my appearance — both good and bad. I once had a lady walk up behind me at work and declare, “Oooh girl, your booty’s getting BIG!”

I had another total stranger inform me that I “do not need to be eating all that sugar” as she watched me prepare my coffee. She did a kind of pointed stare at my hips as she said it, so I smiled and poured a few more in.

When I was in college, I once overheard my boss tell someone “Harmony would be hot if she would just lose some weight.” I’ve had men and women comment on everything from my hair to my breasts in public, because people are rude and crazy and I am probably way too gracious to them. And it’s not just me that has to deal with this, it’s women in general. I know because I’m a girl’s girl, like I said earlier, and we discuss everything.

Today, it happened to my daughter. The cashier at Walmart said “Now look at those big ol’ hips and legs! Whew those are some fat legs!” And I smiled at her and said SHE GOT IT FROM HER MAMA, because she totally did.

Penelope Rose, 10 months old.

It sounds like a benign exchange, and it was. The lady didn’t mean anything by it. Pepper’s a baby! Of course her legs are fat, as they should be. But that moment was pivotal for me because I realized that my daughter is going to face a lifetime of comments directed at her body and her appearance, and this was just the start of it.

Until today my attitude was kind of like, well, that’s just the way things are. People are crazy and you have no control over it – you can only control your reaction to it. But thinking about my daughter and what it’s going to feel like for her to be dissected piece by piece by people who don’t even matter, people pointing out things that she is already self-conscious about … that absolutely infuriates me.

I don’t have control over it. I can only control how I teach her to react to it.

How are you teaching your daughters to react? Because now I’m feeling like instead of training her to be gracious and let it roll off, I should teach her to be one crazy. ass. bitch.

* Cray is short for crazy. Sometimes it’s really burdensome to add that extra “z” in there. Cool people, when they speak, sound like they’ve just gotten back from the dentist. If you don’t sound like that, then I’m sorry to tell you that you’re not cool … but I have a feeling I’m not the first to say so.