Back to School Has Mom Losing Her Cool
Posted
August 15, 2008 at
12:00 pm by
Kymberly
It seems that our nation’s retailers and I have come to a complete and utter impasse as to what “back to school” entails.
Different ideas. I see it as an opportunity to send our students off to school freshly dressed, pressed, and appropriately outfitted to learn. Retailers apparently see it as an opportunity to outfit our nation’s daughters for stripper school.
Where, pray tell, have all the sweet little plaid skirts gone? The Mary Janes? The pinafores?
Outfitting my son it was easy to overlook the occasional inappropriate offering. Then I had to get my daughter ready for her own first day soon to come and the hip huggers hit the fan!
I blame the Bratz dolls. These scantily clad uber-hip hotties make Barbie — even in her Malibu bikini days — look like a nun.
Not content to sit on the shelves and seduce Ken (probably while Barb is away at veterinary/ballerina/pilot training), the self-proclaimed bratty beauties have branched out into clothing, accessories, underwear and probably household appliances by the time you read this.
Lunchboxes violated. Even the lunchbox aisle isn’t safe from these brazen hussies. Having gone on a quest for a non-sexual lunchbox, I find that the bratty brethren have conquered even the lunch tote market; leaving only the smallest niche for the equally vapid Barbie (and I say this as someone who loved Barbie as a girl myself.)
Nonetheless, if my daughter doesn’t like Barbie she doesn’t like her. Can I force the child to carry a hot pink lunchbox with that ubiquiotious vacant plastic stare interrupting her digestion for an entire school year? It’s the stuff future therapy is made of!
Having been in the trenches of our local shopping mecca, I can safely report that there are no wholly innocent lunchboxes available anywhere.
This, mind you, is the place where people travel from three states to shop. The region where you can buy one of everything ever dreamt of. There is a ham store for pity’s sake!
Yet not one retailer is selling a little girl’s lunchbox with a cast of fully clothed characters? Where are the butterflies? The rainbows and unicorns? Where have all the flowers gone?
Over my dead body. At this point, my jaw is clenched and I have the steely eyed gaze of the borderline insane. I have officially turned into the mother I swore I would never be — muttering to myself “over my dead body” as I contemplate sending my daughter through school in homespun dresses and sack cloth.
Forging on to the shoe department I found shoes in sizes for elementary aged child that only a grown transvestite could love. Towering heels. Stacked platforms. Enough buckles and belted things to cause a kindergarten teacher to weep.
Hard to find. I had to go to the far depths of the store, behind some flaming pink stack heel clogs to even secure a pair of plain white sneakers. Checking out, they all but wrapped my cheap sneaks in brown paper to save me embarrassment.
Rounding the corner to the clothing department, there unfolded before us acres of glitter and sequins almost as far as the eye could see.
Somehow, retailers have decided that all sizes from five to 16 are of one fashion sense. This means that a five year old kindergarten student and her 16-year-old cousin are supposed to share the same clothing styles. That is just so wrong on so many levels.
No photo op. Not that the shirt with “100% Hottie” spelled out in red sequins across the chest doesn’t just scream “make sure you get extra copies of those photos for Grandma!,” mind you.
To be fair, my daughter and I did find a plaid skirt. It featured the words “punk princess” repeated throughout the pattern and a giant rhinestone safety pin worthy of any member of the Sex in the City cast. Paired with those sky-high boots from over in shoes, we would have had the perfect outfit to give daddy a complete coronary.
That aside, the experience wasn’t entirely demoralizing. I did find that everything old is new again. I see that the knitted ponchos of my youth are making a strong resurgence, and peasant blouses are back.
Beware and aware. The furry lined boots seemed sturdy, and even the beads and fringe I could even bear. Nonetheless, we cannot let our guard down for a moment. This embrace of all things 70s can only mean one, sad, thing: The culottes are coming. Be very afraid.
Tags: back-to-school, children, clothing, glitter, heels, sequin, shopping, stripper, taste |
4 Responses to “Back to School Has Mom Losing Her Cool”
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately in an effort to remove commercial messages, irrelevancies, excessive foul language, racist/sexist/hateful comments, spoofed/cloaked IPs and/or personal attacks and will be edited/deleted at our discretion. Thank you for your patience.
1. Fear and Parenting in Las Vegas
August 15, 2008 @ 5:22 pm
Reading this makes me quite glad that I’m entering the land of uniforms.
2. blufindr
April 9, 2009 @ 12:00 am
This makes me awfully glad to have uniforms. Australian schools rarely allow students to wear free dress, and even then, there are lots of restrictions on what counts as ‘acceptable’ and what doesn’t.
3. Lauren
April 9, 2009 @ 6:42 pm
Kymberly, I really do love your blogs! I don’t know how I missed this one.
When my daughter was going to Kindergarten, my husband had to take her shopping for school clothes because I was hospitalized. (It pained me, because I had looked forward to this for 5 long years). Anyway, on her first day of school, I was still not up to doing much but I was determined to take her to school. I told her to choose her favorite outfit (the night before) and boy did she ever. I took my 5 year old daughter to school in a denim jacket and a leopard print skirt. With boots. I remember calling a friend, lamenting that I couldn’t allow her to wear that (but it was kind of cute) and my friend said “Don’t stifle her! It’s her decision! She chose the clothes that fit her personality!” So, I walked her in and lo and behold, there were a number of denim and leopard print ensembles at the school.
She’s 17 now and this is the first year that we’ve gone school clothes shopping that she listened to me. It was nice. I was dreading it. I remember the crocheted “panchos.” We were standing in A&F and she was admiring this $184 pancho hanging on the wall. I, as a mom, said, “Baby, I can make that for you for about 15 dollars!” She was mortified of course. That was a couple of years ago. She’s learning the value of money these days, having a job.
She used to tell me that I needed to get in the “new century.” See, I’ve worn suits to work from Talbots for the past 8 years (The suits are all pretty much 8 years old). I didn’t have to tell her; she just seemed to realize that my clothes budget went to her most or all the time. She finally appreciated it.
But I still have this memory in my head of my husband telling me he took her to Dillard’s and just let her choose what she wanted at age 5. He was out of his element. LOL
4. mully
April 9, 2009 @ 10:07 pm
I went thru 12 years of Catholic education and of course, had to wear uniforms the entire 12 years. There are books written about growing up Catholic and one of the funniest chapters in some of them deals with the wearing of those hideous, figure deflating, ugly plaid uniforms. They couldnt have been meant to deter young, lusty, sexually awakened teenage boys because there wasnt a boy within a condom mile of our all girls high school. We could only assume that the reason for the uniforms was to keep all of us from showing our ying-yangs back in those days of micro mini skirts, thereby keeping us chaste and pure (if only they knew!)
Looking back tho and especially after having raised a daughter in a public, non uniform school system, I see that it was much more than keeping us chaste.
It certainly kept all of us on a level playing field. It deterred jealousy and envy. There was nothing to be jealous of, unless it was who looked better in a navy blue blazer. We tried to “outdo” each other in other areas however. We competed more on academic levels. Girls are notoriously catty and when it comes to who looks the best, the cutest, the hottest, the trendiest, wearing uniforms puts a decided kabosh on all of that.
So we competed in maths, sciences, languages, social studies. We tried harder to be better than each other in areas that really mattered. Of course we werent aware at that time, but looking back, I see that with the emphasis off how we physically looked (or didnt look) we had to channel that female competitiveness in another way.
I guess those nuns DID know what they were doing after all.