Sugar and Spice

I’ve never been particularly good at shopping for my own clothes. I’ve managed to package up the whole experience in such a complex and exhausting way and apply so many random and often conflicting rules – about the environment, about the economy, about gender politics- that I’m usually just frozen by indecision, or in a thoughtless, bingey frenzy.

When it comes to my daughter’s clothes, though, I am supposed to be the authority figure and all of the rules I would apply to my own clothes are magnified and she has her own opinion based on not being able to read or understand irony. So it is both more and less complex.

We are not fussy and we happily accept hand-me-downs, some of them with pink glittery ponies on them. I do not particularly like pink glittery ponies, my daughter adores pink glittery ponies, why argue about something as unimportant as pink glittery ponies? The only clothing I do not allow is slutty adult clothing for little girls and a weird violent army clothes for little boys. We also once refused to accept an infant romper with "I'm bringing sexy back" written on it on the grounds that it was disgusting.

So there is the pink thing. The pink with pink and pink shoes thing. I can live with the pink thing, 90% of all the clothes we are given are pink. There is the simple fact that your children give pleasure to other people, and Aunty likes the dress with pink flowers, and a friend loved choosing the other dress with pink flowers, and Granny bought her a lovely dress with pink flowers, and everyone likes seeing their dress on the child they bought it for. So there is always going to be a lot of pink. And there are the toy catalogues, and the pages of pink plastic and toy irons and whorey looking dolls, and whatever the horse thing means and God knows what else to negotiate on her behalf, all the while apparently pretending that feminism is over and the job has been done.

For all the pink, and all the baby dolly cuddly stuff and the behaviour that could be said to be verging on, lets put it out there, simpering, one thing I've always been relaxed about is my daughters’ physical bravery, her desire to run and jump and fall over and get up again in pursuit of her older brother. Her insistence on climbing right back on the slide she has just fallen off again, stopping only briefly to deliver an angry kick to the ladder she is about to climb. In my view, her confidence and determination bode well.

Of course, all this has come at a price. She has copped her share of minor physical injury. There has been blood spilled. As a result, when she went off to daycare on photo day, she had a fairly large fresh scab on her face, between her eyebrows. Not something you could cover up. A record, perhaps of some of her earliest, most admirable qualities, just in the perfect position to giver her a mono-brow and make her look a bit cross.

I picked up the pictures, having been through a completely unfamiliar 3 week process of having to wait to see what they looked like. They have my kids in them, so I was always going to love them. The group photo is a triumph of grim determination over physical impossibility. I showed Bloke and asked “How do they keep them all sitting there” and he said “Nails”. The scab, however, while evident in the group photo, was completely erased from the individual portrait. It has been photo shopped out. I can only assume, on closer examination of this picture, that those are the natural highlights in her hair. That my boy’s changeable eyes were that particular shade of green on that day. That his hand is actually resting on her arm. I presume changing those things would be more difficult than leaving them alone.

However, I'm aware that I'm becoming more and more incompetent as the pace of technological change increases. I fancy I’m clever and technological because I can tell this picture has been altered. I have no idea how easy it will be to do these things in five years time. Will we be driving hovercars soon? Will there be gap toothed school photos in the future? Uneven fringes cut by well meaning parents? A record of being a tough little kid in a glittery pony T-shirt? What will become of the two year old girls, raised on a steady diet of princesses, perfection, Paris Hilton and tiny replicas of domestic appliances? The battle lines are drawn, but I don’t know where. Has fight started, or did I capitulate the moment I consented to the High Five hat?