From the time we’re little, nearly every girl dreams of the day she can wear makeup. It starts when we see our mother apply lipstick for the first time, and suddenly, all we can think about is getting our hands on that glorious tube of Estee Lauder red.
Most mothers take solace in the fact that we can quickly whip out the old “you’re too young to wear makeup, sweetie,” reasoning to end the conversation. Until the next time she asks…and the next.
At some point, however, she does become old enough to wear makeup, and therein lies the next challenge… teaching her how to apply it without ending up looking like a bad drag queen with loose morals.
Here’s the thing about makeup – on older skin it does what it is supposed to do; make you feel prettier and look better. But on younger skin – skin with no flaws or wrinkles – it can actually look wrong. All kinds of wrong.
This surprising possibility hadn’t occurred to me until I saw my 13 year old daughter walk out of the bathroom for the first time with a full face of makeup, causing me to stop dead in my tracks.
She didn’t look better. She looked worse. Visions of Jodi Foster in “Taxi Driver” swirled through my head. I stared at her like a deer in headlights (or maybe it was the intense shine radiating off of her lip gloss).
After several deep breaths to squelch the “WASH THAT OFF” that was bubbling up through my vocal chords, I gathered my perspective. I am her mother and as such, it’s my job to help guide her into womanhood slowly and gently.
But seriously, at that moment my little girl looked more like womanhood had punched her squarely in the face.
Bearings firmly in place, I encouraged her to wash it all off so we could start from square one. I put definite limits on which items of makeup she was allowed to wear for her age, and then taught her how to apply it with a lighter touch.
It didn’t go as smoothly as it sounds – she fought me…HARD. But when she realized that I could put the kibosh on her plans of wearing any makeup at all, she relented.
Even after all that, it’s still a constant battle to keep her from overdoing it, and I’m not just fighting her – I often feel like I’m fighting society. Between peer pressure and the mixed messages from expensive advertising campaigns, I’ve got my hands full. She’s a thirsty girl in a world dying to get her to drink the KoolAid.
Sometimes it’s next to impossible not to throw up my hands and say, “oh, just do whatever you WANT” when she’s having one of her “teenzilla” meltdowns. Having a support system of her father, close friends and fellow parents really helps. Patience and a good memory are important, too – as is faith. I really believe that someday everything I am so desperately trying to teach her about being a woman will come together, and she will blow me away while teaching me a thing or two, as she often does.
That said, I am never one to be presumptuous enough to assume that all my best laid plans will play out as expected, so I have a Plan B squarely in place. There’s a plot of land out in Amish country that has my name written all over it – of course they serve a different brand of KoolAid there, but that’s another story entirely.
