being a mom
10 Reasons I’m Happy To Be Raising A Girly Girl
I was really excited to have a baby girl; but not for the reasons that this title implies. My number one reason for being thrilled on the day that I found out the sex of my child is because I am short.
Really short. I am not even five foot. Being short is hard, but I always assumed that it is harder for boys. There is no science to back up this assumption, but I was still pretty jazzed to find out that I was having a teeny weeny sans peeny baby.
I hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to the concept of gender after my initial celebration over my kid’s sex; I just assumed I would show her awesome stuff and she would like it and any concept of what was “for girls” and what was “for boys” would fall by the wayside.
I was wrong.
My kid likes girly stuff, or whatever it is that we traditionally conceptualize as “girly”, which I will add to make my gender studies professor proud. I don’t dislike girly stuff, but I am somewhat perplexed by it. I was perplexed by it as a kid, and now even more so because the girly stuff of my kid’s youth is not the girly stuff of mine. Still, it got to a point where I realized that if I was going to show an interest in what my kid liked, that meant getting on board. So now I’m raising a girly girl. Later, I’ll suss out the feminist implications of that. For now, we’re just having fun. Here’s why I love doing it this way:
1. I Can Show Her That It Isn’t Bad To Like This Stuff.
When I was younger, and even now, liking “girly stuff” was profoundly uncool and incredibly passe. It still is. If I had a dollar for every time I heard the phrase “I was the girl who played with G.I. Joes instead of Barbies” or “I can’t be friends with women. I don’t like shopping and glitter” spoken in a disgusted tone, I’d have lots of money to go shopping for glitter.
All you have to do is look at the vitriol for Twilight and shoe shopping or understand that the phrase “stop acting like a little girl’ is a devastating insult to see that this is a problem.
2. Turns Out, Shopping Is Kinda Fun
I never liked shopping. I have big boobs and short legs and no money and everything I wore was too immodest according to the adults in my life, unless it was a big brown trash bag. I sort of love that my daughter loves shopping because it turns out, I actually like it too.
3. Being Crafty Is More Fun With Company
I actually learned to sew by accident. I was sent to detention and walked into the wrong room and it turned out it was the after school costume class. My mentor-to-be had brownies and said, “sew that button onto that shirt and I’ll sign your detention slip”. I never missed another session, and now I get to teach my daughter how to sew and crochet and swear when you poke yourself with a pin. We like to live dangerously, so we measure once and cut whenever.
 4. You Don’t Want To Have To Learn How To Put Makeup On As An Adult
Trust me. I never learned how to put makeup on so I went through some extremely interesting phases as an adult as I tried to figure out how to do it. And no, women don’t have to wear makeup but I like to because it is fun and makes my lips look amazing. So I’ll teach her how to do this, too. We’re already practicing with some stuff from Toys R’ Us that burns when you put it on your eyelids.
