How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane by Johanna Stein

bra. True, she was wearing it on her head, but I attribute this to her poor hand-eye coordination more than anything else.
    Also, the child has become obsessed with wearing makeup. I have tried to express to her that, for me, makeup is primarily for spackling purposes, but this has not swayed her from habitually attempting to paint her face like some two-bit, pull-up-wearing floozy.
    When we moved a few months ago, the husband insisted that the child be allowed input into redecorating her room. As a result, her bedroom now has pink walls, pink sheets, and a pink light fixture. It looks like someone ground up a bunch of flamingos into a paste and flung it on her walls.
    Today she asked me if she looks cute when she’s sleeping. My immediate, unedited response, “No. You’re hideous.” It didn’t hurt her feelings—on the contrary, she simply chose not to believe me. So, on a positive note, her self-esteem is rock solid. On the other hand: GROSS.
    F OUR Y EARS A ND C HANGE
    On Halloween it really seemed as though we were making progress. Though she’d asked to be Cinderella for her preschool Halloween party (ugh), she also expressed a desire to go trick-or-treating as Spider-Man (yay!). This was a decided win, though in retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have shouted, “HELL, YEAH!!!!”
    I made my way to the mall, where I found a top-notch Spider-Man costume, the last one at the store. Another mother tried to wrest it from my hands, but I wasn’t aboutto give it up. She even made her son ask me for it (seriously, lady, how desperate can you be, shoving your crying kid at me?), but I think the experience will serve him well—he should learn that life is filled with disappointment.
    When I awoke on Halloween morning, the kid was already dressed in a homemade Cinderella outfit she’d cobbled together (blue towel, dishwashing gloves, tinfoil crown, and “magic toilet paper wand”). Unnerved, I held out the Spider-Man outfit, but she shook her head and said she’d “changed her mind.” I bit my tongue and let her wear the damn princess outfit to preschool. It was later, when she got home from school and refused to change into her Spider-Man costume for the evening’s festivities, that I may have lost my cool. I won’t divulge exactly what went down, except to say that strong words were spoken, tears were released, and a twenty-minute time-out was given (to me; by me).
    All of which is to explain how I found myself, the following morning, filled with a form of regret that can be purged only by driving to the mall and purchasing a fully licensed Cinderella costume, complete with a real fake wand and Lucite slippers. Yes, it was a hard pill to swallow, but at least the gown is blue. The look on the kid’s face when I gave it to her—that did help the pill go down. And the 25 percent off post-Halloween discount—that paid for the pill.
    C ONCLUSION
    Despite my attempts to mold the girl in my Manly Lady image, it seems that it is not to be. She’s proven herself tobe a Barbie-playing, jewelry-loving pretty pink princess, a fact that baffles me, as all I’ve ever wanted is for her to be her own woman (unless that woman is a Barbie-playing, jewelry-loving pretty pink princess). So rather than impose my will on her—as righteous and correct as I still believe it to be—I have chosen to stand down and abandon OFTP, and instead will look upon this as a “learning experience”: she may be my daughter—but in the end, she’s her own person.
    We all have dreams for our kids, until the day we discover that their dreams are not ours to have. And though you may pray that your daughter becomes a judo–black belt, multilingual engineering student at Yale, she just may end up the second-highest-paid stripper at “Cheeks’ Bar and Grill.” And I guess, as long as she’s happy, there’s nothing wrong with that.