6/22/10
“Well, I couldn’t find the shoes you asked for, but I did find these,” said the (hapless) salesman at our local shoe store. “They’re pretty.”
In the early pictures of our child, when she is 13, 14, 15 months old, and unable yet to express her decided opinions in English, she wears cool, gender-neutral, trendy, eco-hip sweaters, tops and jeans. A beige L.L. Bean sweater with stripes in blue, red, yellow and green. And she looks miserable.
Was it because she’d spent her first 11 months in an SWI (Social Welfare Institute, the Chinese euphemism for orphanage)? Because she’d been moved 7,800 miles to join her new family? Who looked, smelled, sounded, tasted, felt strange? No, no, and no! (Well, okay, yes, yes, and yes, but that’s too heart-breaking, and it’s more fun to be funny, to paraphrase the Cat in the Hat.)
One night when she was just 2, and she and I were almost done with the drama of bed, bath, and beyond - that is, bathing, drying, diapering, clothing, tooth-brushing, rocking, reading, singing, turning on music, dimming lights, sitting nearby until she fell asleep in the crib in our room - I tiptoed out of the room, and immediately she popped up like a jack-in-the-box.
“You’re okay, I’m here,” I must’ve said. “What’s wrong?”
“Pink shoes!” she replied.
Only she was just 2 and not entirely articulate, and I didn’t quite catch her drift. (Nor did I yet quite understand the force of willful nature I was living with.) Would you have?
“Sh-sh. Go to sleep.”
“Pink shoes! Pink shoes!” Stubborn mom, stubborn child.
This went on for a while until I understood that she wanted her pink shoes in the crib. And then for another long while until I understood that she wanted to SLEEP in the pink shoes.
Pink is not my favorite color, and I didn’t intend to fall into any stereotypical gender traps -I’d read (and agreed with) Peggy Orenstein’s diatribe about the evil Princess empire’s hold on very young girls - but I had recently caved and bought a pair of pink Maryjane sneakers from Target because daycare wanted the kids in sneakers and these were so easy to put on! And, well, they were cute. And see how happy she looks in the picture above?
You know where this is going: The 2-year-old slept that night and many others wearing her pink shoes, and Mom scurried off to Target to buy the exact same shoes in every half-size up for the next two years.
Friends, I’ve got a girly-girl on my hands, and I’m here to tell you that it’s nature, not nurture. I’m vaguely athletic, and have been accused in the past of dressing like a pre-teen boy.
You think you are influencing your child, and then one day you wake up and you go to your closet to get dressed and you realize that not only does she insist on wearing dresses and skirts every single day of her life, rain or sun or sleet or snow, but you can’t remember the last time you wore pants, and your shelves are stacked with your very own colorful (!) T-shirts adorned with beads and birds and flowers, and you’re starting to think all your (hip) black-clad New York colleagues DO look sort of scary or sickly or at least unimaginative.
And so it was a couple weeks ago that we were attempting to give our local shoe store our business, and had picked out several pairs of pink shoes to try on, but the (hapless) salesman hadn’t found any in stock and came out with two pair - one navy with an embroidered white flower, one black patent leather.
“These are pretty,” he said.
Oh, kind sir, with all due respect, you could not be more wrong.
We did not burst out laughing, but we did have to leave, right away, and go home and order online - pink shoes.