To be a girl.

She took a bath this evening, one mostly designed to kill some time before the joyous arrival of bedtime.  Late evening baths always call for “mermaid hair”, meaning I blow dry her long, dripping snakes of hair into sleek, feathery weightlessness. 

Blow dries are special to Olivia Scout.  She gazes at herself in the mirror, watching her hair fly around her head, and the expression on her face is always one of pure satisfaction that reads, “I’m beautiful.”  You know that unselfconscious knowledge that little girls carry around?  The one that tells them they are the most gorgeous creature on earth?  I love it.  I love it that she has it.  Even as I’m certain that at some point, maybe as early as eight?  As late as fifteen?  It will probably leave her.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to raise a girl.  It is not really that raising a girl is more difficult than it would be a boy, I’m not saying that at all, just that the challenges are different.  And they are personal, since I’ve been slogging my own way through them for my very self.

I hope Olivia always feels beautiful.  But even more, I hope that she realizes that cultivating intelligence, practicing kindness, and persevering to achieve her goals are far more important than winning the genetic lottery.  Not to mention they’re a lot more useful in regular life situations. 

May she never pick apart her body the way I have and often still do.  I hope she understands that, while maintaining a healthy, strong body is an important and worthy cause, her physical imperfections, which she will have just like the rest of us, will only define her as much as she allows them to. 

I hope she figures out (preferably before Junior High!) that a man worth loving will love her for her personality and brain, in addition to thinking she’s gorgeous. 

Ohhh, I hope she recognizes the sheer madness and unattainability of the expectations of female beauty in the world all around her.

I hope she acknowledges the powerful female role models surrounding her; her grandmothers in particular, who are supreme examples of what strong, courageous womanhood is all about. 

(and pretty please let her think her mom is super cool, even when she’s a teenager.)

She was cold, so I let her borrow my sweater.  She looked down at herself and said, “I look like Cruella DeVil!”  So here we have her Cruella face.  You probably haven’t noticed that I think she’s awesome.