Keeping Up Appearances

I always wondered why my sister Lynne was so appearance conscious. Our mother wasn't. I wasn't. But Lynne very definitely was.

I have always been a function over form person. I really don't care what something looks like as long as it gets the job done. Like most kids in families of limited means, though, I was also very self conscious about anything that singled me out as poorer than the other kids, so I decided that that was what Lynne was thinking.

I was sure there had to be some environmental cause. I grew up believing that all taste was environmental. I have long since conceded that I was wrong.

My oldest daughter is so much more like Lynne than like me in her desire for impressive outward appearances. Since I was born when Lynne was 11, I didn't get to see her as a baby or toddler. I would watch Lana as a baby, displaying behavior that was totally foreign to me, and think, "Where did that come from?"

When she was only about six months old, Lana began to be stressed out by wrinkles in her crib sheet. Really. I would lay her down, and she would frown at the sheet, then begin making a frustrated noise as she smoothed her hand over the wrinkles, trying to wipe them away. Of course, even when she was successful in smoothing them out, any tiny move on her part would cause new ones. So, she'd start smoothing again, going, "Uh! Uh! Uh!" Thankfully, in fairly short order she would look away or be too tired to keep it up, and she would fall asleep.

She announced when she was barely two that she wanted to start going potty in the bathroom. I was sure she had no idea what that entailed, but after she hounded me for two weeks, I figured, fine. We'll see how this goes. It only took her a week or so to get it down to the point that she was dry all day. I was surprised and she was happy.

What annoyed her tremendously was throwing away the diaper she still wore overnight. After I took them off, I had always rolled up diapers and used the tapes to tape the bundle shut before throwing them away. I think most mothers do. It incensed Lana that she did not know how to roll them up herself and I refused to do them. I wanted her to take the diaper off herself and just throw it away. She hated that. It looked wrong! It was messy! She was totally undeterred by my insistence that it was OK for things to be messy in the garbage can. I wanted her to function independently, but she wanted things to look right.

At age two, she also started stressing out about wrinkles on her socks. You know how your foot is usually extended when you put your sock on, but when you flex it back or stand up, it creases across the front of your ankle? Lana hated that. It drove her crazy every day for literally years. She could not understand why this did not bother me, why I figured it was just OK to walk around in wrinkly socks. She dealt with this by pulling her socks up with great force many, many times a day. That stretched the socks out, sometimes to the point that the fibers were breaking, so now the socks not only wrinkled but sagged. This made her just about frantic. I wondered how many years it would take before she started taking our advice and just leaving them alone. Pointing out to her that our socks also wrinkled across the front did not appease her. To her, that was just proof that we were too clueless to know how socks should look.

In kindergarten she added a new sock worry. Now, it caused her a great deal of distress that the seam across the toes of the sock meant that the front end was more squared off than rounded. She would look at socks after she'd pulled them on and start making the familiar frustrated huffing sounds. "Look at that! They stick out!" she would say, pointing out some tiny protrusion or squaring off on either end of her toes. "They're fine," we'd say. "Socks do that." She became even more frustrated, wondering how her parents could be so utterly clueless.

Again, she dealt with the situation by pulling on her socks. She would grab the offending spots and pull them down under her feet, then carefully slide her feet into her shoes so the "corners" would be held down and out of sight. Naturally, this meant that getting her shoes on could take quite a while. And again, the major effect of this was stretching and pulling the socks out of shape, until the toe seams were two or three times the width of the rest of the sock. This did not actually bother Lana, because the wider the socks, the easier it became to wrap them around her foot.

She stopped being so obsessed with her socks quite so much about the time she started obsessing about the rest of her wardrobe. She had a very clear set of wardrobe dos and don'ts at a very early age.

During her kindergarten year, we bought a pair of ballerina flats that were, I thought, slightly large. They were on sale, though, and too large eventually becomes just right. When she put them on for school one morning, I asked if they fit. She assured me that they did, and I didn't think too much more about it in the morning rush.

When I picked her up that day, Terry and I were walking instead of bringing the car. I don't remember quite why. Even though we lived close to the school, we had to go down one of the busiest streets in town to get there. It wasn't exactly a serene stroll, so we didn't do it often. We set off for home, hampered by the fact that Lana's shoes came off every two or three steps.

At first, I thought it was some form of clumsiness. Then I started looking more closely. Her feet popped out of her shoes literally every step, and once out of every three or so times the shoes would fall all the way off. They were obviously still too big for her.

"Lana! Have your shoes been doing that all day?" I asked.

"Well, yeah," she said. "I tried to fix it." She slid her foot out of the shoe to show me that, across the bottom, she'd folded socks and laid them the length of the shoe to take up some of the extra room. "It didn't work, though."

"So your shoes have been falling off your feet every two or three steps all day today."

"Well, yeah."

"Lana! I asked you this morning if they fit! They obviously don't! Why would you wear shoes that are too big for you?"

She looked at me as if this was a patently stupid question. Then she looked down at her immobile feet. "Look how pretty they are," she said.

She went through a stage of insisting that everything she wore, even her underwear, had to be the same color. She started insisting that her hair be "done" for school when she was about seven. Ponytails were one of her favorite styles until she wore one for picture day in 5th grade. "I look BALD!" she shrieked when we got the photos back. "I look like I don't have any hair at all!" I don't think she ever wore a ponytail again. Dressing for the weather was always a problem; she would plan her wardrobe for days or weeks in advance, and was always thrown when told that she couldn't wear something because of the weather. She was happiest dressing in outfits that came with two pieces, so she was sure that everything "matched."

Coats were a constant struggle. "It's puffy! It makes me look fat!" she'd wail, at the ripe old age of nine and ten. We would insist that she leave the house in a coat in cold weather, knowing full well that she'd ditch it as soon as she was out of our sight. Terry, normally blasé about clothes, followed suit with a coat aversion of her own. It was maddening.

We'd get phone calls from friends, offering us coats for our kids. "They looked so cold walking home from school today," one friend said. When I told her that they both had coats in their backpacks, and that they refused to wear them until they were a block away from home, she thought that I was too embarrassed to admit that we didn't own any. Another friend refused to take my word for it, and simply showed up on our doorstep with hand me down coats for the girls. It wasn't the first, or the last, time we would be given coats. It didn't matter if we bought them or if someone else did, if they were new or used, Lana and Terry refused to wear them except in our presence. That problem wasn't solved until high school when they got letterman jackets. Those, they would wear.

Even into high school, Lana would try to put her clothing into "outfits." She would decide that a particular pair of jeans went with only two T shirts, and refuse to wear the pieces with other garments. We would tell her that jeans, any jeans, went with any of her tops, and she'd look at us as though we were crazy. We'd tell her that black and white went with any other color imaginable, and she'd look horrified. To her, black or white went with black or white.

When she was invited to her first formal, she insisted on extensive jewelry shopping, so she could find jewelry with stones the exact color of her dress. We told her, over and over, that pearls, diamonds, gold and silver would all be appropriate with a formal. She thought we had absolutely the worst taste imaginable. To Lana, you could only wear pearls if your dress had pearls on it; ditto for diamonds, gold or silver.

She was mortified when we couldn't find maroon shoes to go with her maroon dress and garnet jewelry. She was sure that her black shoes would look "stupid," and cause her to be a social outcast. She only wore them because it came down to wearing black shoes or staying home. She came back from the ball amazed: "There were other girls there in maroon, and they wore black shoes. There were girls wearing black shoes with blue and red dresses, too," she marveled. It has never done any good to point out that we knew this beforehand.

She still has trouble dressing for the weather. At college, she's been known to wear her favorite mesh slide shoes in six inches of snow.

While I take reasonable care not to look like a homeless person, I am not particularly "into" clothes. And with my children, the most important thing to me is that they function independently. As long as their clothing is clean and at least close to the right size, I will only veto it if it poses a health or morality issue. I don't care if my kids want to wear orange and purple together.

I once let my youngest daughter go to church in a Snow White dress up dress. When she put it on, I thought briefly about asking her to change. Then, I thought: it's a dress. It's clean. It fits. It's not too revealing. She looks adorable in it. Plus, she's 4 years old. So, she wore it, and actually got quite a few compliments. Life works that way when you're 4.

Poor Lana was always frustrated by my willingness to let her younger siblings dress themselves. She gave up trying to influence Alex too much, theorizing that, as a boy, he'd be hopeless about clothing issues. She would frequently tangle with Terry and Hallie.

Terry, being just a year younger, fared better than Hallie, upon whom Lana felt she could wield greater influence. Lana would try to coax very independent Hallie into clothes Lana had chosen for her. Their arguments would filter out into the hall and occasionally down the stairs.

"Honey, wouldn't you like to wear this shirt with those pants, instead?"

"NO!"

"But sweetie, these would look so much better."

"NO!"

It would finally drive me crazy enough that I'd intervene. "Lana! Go downstairs and let your sister dress herself."

"But Mom! She has no idea what looks good together."

"I don't care. Downstairs."

Poor Lana would sulk away, convinced that no one understood. How had she gotten stuck in a family of stubborn, styleless women, she wondered. And how could I not appreciate her efforts to "help" her sister?

Hallie is a bit older now, and often makes an attempt at matching her clothes. Still, she's young, and her choices don't always make sense to adults. In kindergarten, she wore her velvet dresses as everyday clothes, and chose sweatpants and a T shirt for picture day. Well, OK. It's her photo. She was clean, comfortable and happy.

A year later, she's in first grade and has just performed in her first school music program. She wore a pastel striped sweater under a denim jumper with red and black accents. Again, she was clean, comfortable, happy and even in a dress for a special occasion. She had a great time, and was very proud. We took tons of photos and clapped loudly. I just knew, though, that when I e-mailed Lana a photo at college she would groan and say, "Why did Mom let her wear that?"

All the Japanese People Were Wearing Pants

"All the Japanese people were wearing pants!"

The outrage in my oldest daughter's voice carried all the way over the line, clear as a bell despite the hundreds of miles inbetween us. She was a newlywed, unpacking in her first home with her husband. She'd finally taken most of the stuff from her room at our house (even though she hadn't lived there for 5 years), and was looking through her photos. She'd come across one from Sea Life Park in Hawaii.

We'd taken the trip to Oahu when she was 11, Terry was 10 and Alex was three. We'd tried to sign up for a dolphin encounter at the park; the highlight was getting into the dolphin pool. There was only one opening, so we signed Lana up. She's always loved the ocean and dolphins in particular, so it was obvious which of us would enjoy the encounter the most.

Aside from mainlanders, Japanese vacationers made up most of the tourists we saw. Every other member of her dolphin encounter was Japanese, and most were adults.

Lana wore her swimming suit under her clothes all day. When the time came for the dolphin program and they were ushered into the briefing room, Lana started taking her clothes off. "Honey, we don't get into the pool until the end," one of the dolphin trainers said. "You can change then."

"No, I'm OK," she said, neatly folding her shirt and shorts.

Before they got into the pool, a group photo was taken. Since Lana was one of the shortest ones, she was in front. The other participants hadn't changed yet; no one thought anything of it at the time. She'd been in her suit for half an hour or so at that point.

Each participant also got a photo of themselves and a dolphin while they were in the pool - that's one of my favorite photos from that trip.

Now, years later, Lana was beyond scandalized by the group picture. "I'm wearing a swim suit, socks and sneakers! I look ridiculous! Everybody else has pants on! Why didn't you make me wear pants?" Neither her dad or I could see anything to get worked up about, which made her even more upset. "My husband laughed! He says he's going to send it in to awkwardfamilyphotos.com!"

For the last few years, she's brought the subject of what I should, and should not, have let her wear up several times - "How could you let me wear that?" The thing is, we're not talking about photos of her as a toddler in a tutu and cowboy boots (which, admittedly, would have been fine with me). Most of the time, her age is well into double digits, and the clothes in question were favorites of hers. Sure, they might be out of style years later, but they weren't then. I point out that she has never liked my taste in clothes - she spent most of her life trying to dress me. I remind her that she would have argued bitterly. "Did you want me to spend every day hitting my head against a brick wall? We would have both been miserable." She still insists, "You should have!"

Until she hit puberty and realized that jeans were fashionable, she hated them. "They're stiff, they're hot and they make me sweat." Even at camp, she wore knit stretch pants. In her late teens, this just mortified her. "WHY didn't you take away all my stretch pants and only buy me jeans?"

"Because. You. Hated. Them!"

When I did very rarely put my foot down, she'd had meltdowns. In junior high, she'd tried to wear dirty pants to school. You'd think someone meticulous about appearances would never consider such a thing, but in her mind, it was better than wearing what was still in her closet. After I insisted that she change, she hauled another pair of jeans out of the hamper and I had to be very specific - "You will not just change, you will put on something clean."

"But all my pants are dirty!"

"Then wear a skirt or dress."

"To school?" She loved her dresses, and she owned - I am not making this up, 26 of them at the time - but not to wear to school.

I insisted. She complained. I dropped off a very angry girl in a dress just before the bell rang.

When I picked her up after school, she flumped onto the seat and slouched down, announcing, "I knew it. Everyone said I looked ridiculous."

Sigh. "Lana," I said, "I know you. You walked into class this morning, and the first thing out of your mouth was, 'I feel ridiculous. I didn't want to wear this, but my mother made me.' " She stared at me with that deer-in-the-headlights look. "Honey, I know what you're hoping when you say things like that is that your friends will say, 'Oh, no, you look great! I love that outfit!' but what they're actually going to say is, 'You're right. You look awful. I can't believe you left the house looking like that.' You cannot get angry with people for agreeing with you." She said nothing on the ride home.

At 16, she'd once had to stay home from a dance after having a shrieking fit and throwing her shoes across the living room. (We had guests, too; great.) She always arranged her clothes into Outfits, deciding that a particular top ONLY went with particular bottoms. In this case, it was a denim skirt, white top and white canvas shoes. When the shoes were new, they looked great. They were now far from new; she'd actually used them for creek walking at camp the previous summer, and it was now December. Her teacher at church had actually requested that she not wear them to church any more. After she wore them to church again, her teacher was deeply puzzled - "I mean, I know she has nice shoes. I've seen her wear them." But, in her mind, ONLY those shoes went with the denim skirt. One night, she tried to wear them to a dance, and I'd had the audacity to tell her to put on another pair of shoes. She owned quite a few. After the shoes sailed across the room, accompanied by angry yelling, her dad and I had simultaneously said, "OK, you can stay home," and she burst into tears, wailing, "Dances are the only thing in my life I have to look forward to!"

And now I was getting lectures on how I should have argued with her MORE often? To what end?

The thing is, I naively believed that at some point, my kids would appreciate a mom who hadn't micromanaged their wardrobes. I've actually had to reshoot a senior portrait session, because the girl showed up to the shoot alone and her mother hated what she was wearing in the photos. She wasn't dressed scantily, or in anything dirty or controversial, but she was (gasp) wearing pants, and her mother wanted her photographed in a dress. "And she didn't even DO anything with her hair!" the mother told me in outrage, intimating that I should have refused to photograph a girl who showed up looking the way she did every day. I never put my kids through that.

The thing is, my oldest still hates my taste. Not six months before the conversation about the Japanese people and their pants, she had literally been in tears over the shirt we bought her. We took a family trip, and on one day we all planned to wear matching shirts, so we bought all of us one. She hated hers, convinced it was too big and too baggy and she "looked ridiculous." All five of us assured her that she looked fine, but she only consented to wear it under a jacket that she kept zipped up. And this is an adult! How in the world would it make sense to have had those conversations every day?

(I wrote this in 2003. We will obviously never be on the same page about this.

My daughter loves me anyway.

But, I do fear that she'll destroy childhood photos.)