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My younger children will wear anything, including too-small clothes, hand-me-downs, outfits meant for the opposite gender, discarded Halloween costumes, underwear as outerwear and lettuce leaves leftover from dinner. They are not, as it were, particular.
My oldest child is a whole ‘nother story. Left to her own devices she dresses herself in the same clothes she’s been wearing for the past four years. Literally. Clothes that are threadbare at the hems and cuffs, which are out of season, and which are worn almost to the point of allowing her bid’ness to show through.
She still wears a “Big Sister” shirt she received on the occasion of the birth of her sibling–the sibling who now uses the potty, writes most of her letters and plans her own meals. Granted her desired meals consist of ramen noodles, canned tuna and sweetened condensed milk, but the point is that she’s trying. No, actually. The point is that it’s been too damn long time since my firstborn became a big sister for her to continue to wear that shirt. Don’t you think?
Upon occasion I will purchase for this child new outfits at the store. I will bring them home, and like a sad slave place them at her feet. Then I’ll back slowly away.
More often than not she’ll poke at the clothes with finger or toe, then outright reject the offerings. “It’s too blue,” she’s said in the past. “There are words on it,” another time. Or “I don’t like designs on my butt,” though in that particular case I can’t say as I blame her.
And back to the store those clothes will go. “Just tell me what you want,” I beg. “Do you want something like this?” I gesture toward her current outfit, a size too small and worn through at the knee.
“Yes, like this is good,” she vaguely says, and yet when I return with an ensemble that could pass for its twin sister she turns up her wee nose, sighs dramatically and appears the next morning with knees and a thin moon of belly on display.
All of this is very good on my pocketbook, but now the child is down to but a trio of clothes she’ll deign to wear. I do laundry every bleeding day, but even I cannot insure that she’ll have a clean outfit, especially given her propensity for leaving dirty things in a ball next to the tub.
In desperation I recently hauled her to the store in the hope that she’d pick for herself something acceptable. She turned up her nose at the spaghetti-strapped frippery, the Hannah Montana themed jerseys and the sparkly spangled jeans. To everything I pointed she shook her head. Hard enough, in some cases, to concuss herself. I wished.
“Do you want to look at the boys’ clothes?” I asked in desperation, thinking of the book open on my pillow.
The head-shaking escalated to the point I could hear the joints in her neck grinding, and that was when I lost my shit. “Just. Pick. Something. Now,” I hissed. “Pick two new outfits this instant.” She saw The Look of the Angry Mother, turned off the attitude and with breathtaking speed a pair of tops and their matching bottoms flew into our cart. “Are you happy?” I asked, and remarkably, work done, the tension drained from her small body.
“I can’t wait to wear them, Mommy,” she said with a modicum of pleasure.
A modicum of pleasure from this girl is like fountains of glee from someone else, so I ventured a suggestion which twenty minutes earlier no doubt would have caused her to crumple into a screaming ball of mushed up personhood. “Soon honey, you’ll need one of these.” I guided our cart down the little girls’ bra aisle and watched her eyes widen at the itty-bitty colorful triangles. “What do you think?”
“Not yet Mommy,” she almost whispered.
“No honey,” I answered gently. “Not quite yet.”
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