Brave Clothing Choices
Have you ever heard your own words uttered out of your child’s mouth? It’s an unnerving experience. You might be thinking that if your child is advising you about something that you yourself have parented them about that it doesn’t count as a lesson for YOU, but it does. In this week’s topic of lessons, it’s all about appearance. I wasn’t feeling good recently. I didn’t want to get out of bed, let alone drag myself to my two jobs, one being in front of other know-it-all teens and the other being a friendly real estate agent. No, I felt like I had been run over by a envoy of semis and wanted to crawl back under my covers never to be seen from again. My daughter sees this and says, “Mom, you need to make yourself look cute and you’ll feel better. That’s what I do.” I was somewhat surprised by this admission. Yes, she does tend to take pride in her appearance, but I just figured it was because we all called her “Barbie,” so it was a more or less peer pressure kind of action. Apparently, it was more than that. Even when she doesn’t feel like it, which can be quite often, she still does her makeup and hair and dons something stylish to encourage her to feel better. I have to say that she wasn’t wrong in this situation. I did put myself together and go to work, regardless of my not feeling like it. It was nice to actually have my advice applied, even if it was in a sort of backward kind of way when it’s directed back at me.
The subject of appearance brings me to another topic I NEVER thought I would ever talk about: teen attire. We as adults and, especially in the professional world of education, tend to be very judgmental when it comes to the clothing teens wear, specifically girls. If they show off their legs or arms or even their chests, then they are all sexually deviant people. Do we not remember how we were when we were thinner, firmer, and parts of our bodies were in their correct placement? We liked to show off our bodies too. I’m not saying that being scantily clad in a high school setting is the best idea, but maybe we could look at it a tad bit differently. It takes guts, and I mean, major guts to wear leggings. You are essentially showing off every curve of your bottom half to everyone and there are not tunics long enough to cover everything and if you do try to cover up then you are ashamed of the shape of your body. Wow! I never thought of it that way when I made sure I wore thigh-length tunics so as not to encourage any derisive thoughts about my middle-age body to my students, which is so very ludicrous to me. No one in their right mind is going to be checking out my Mom-bod when surrounded by beautifully fit youth, but I digress. Did you ever think that maybe it takes courage to wear the clothes that society has determined to be fashionable in this day and age? Kids want to fit in; they want to look put together, and they want to be fashionable, and that fashion is to wear form-fitting clothes, whether you have a model body or not. It’s a tough world these teens live in, so on days that my daughter wears her leggings, I have to applaud her bravery. At least she has the nerve to proudly showcase her body. I know I don’t.
