Making Daddy Beautiful

Apparently, people will really like Daddy if Emma makes him beautiful.

On one hand, we want to correct this, because it's not what we wish for her world, in our idealistic dreams of how life should be. But it is true, beautiful people have an easier time of things than people who are considered less attractive do. They get jobs more easily, are paid more, promoted more, are generally speaking, more popular and socially successful. My husband is a fairly good looking guy, and people make life easier for him because of it, he knows it and appreciates it, not with vanity but with recognition of the fact that some things are easier for him than others. I'm ok looking, I had my better days, but I'm ok enough that it's been an advantage for me in the past when I was working, or meeting new people, moving to a new city, trying to find my spouse.

Neither my husband or I are particularly vain people. I went to beauty school because I enjoy doing make up on other people, however it's rare that I wear any, or bother to brush my own hair, or match my own clothing, or groom myself beyond basic necessities (I am, as the song goes, a beauty school drop out). This is due in part to allowing frumpiness to set in with motherhood and staying home, in part to living on a rural island where the bulk of my mothering social circle is populated by hairy-armpits and bare faces, and in part because we've been struggling financially for some time and so when I do spend money on clothes and the little extras, it's pretty much always for the kids. The longer this goes on, the easier it is to continue to let myself go, though we have good reason to think that the financial aspect of this will be changing for the better and that I'll be shopping for cool handmade clothes on etsy.com and punk rock band shirt stores and interesting boutiques in the exotic lands we hope to travel to with our children. But in the meantime, I observe the charisma that the fashionable mommas exude when they take time to care for themselves, and I swallow some jealousy, maybe it leaks out as a bitchy expression from my frumpy head sometimes, as this blog entry made me ponder.

Something I've considered is that I am a fashion failure and yet the mother of two girls, who I know will be more socially accepted in life if they know how to dress themselves, the problem is, that I am SO not the person to teach them.

If I trust in the unschooling process however, then I can trust that my kids will figure out their own fashion sense, and will learn how to be fashionable people if it's important to them. So it would be wrong for me to correct Emma's observation that people who dress up and groom themselves to look beautiful are liked by people. Sure, it's not the only reason people are liked, but it is part of one's charisma, and it can't be discounted that we are visual creatures, attracted to visually pleasing people.

My little Emma has already picked up on this somewhere, and rather than trying to pretend that the world is a less shallow place than it actually is, I think it's a better idea to allow her to process the reality of our world on her own terms. If this means "making Daddy look beautiful so that people will like him" then this is where she is practising this role that our society will undoubtedly ask her to play. Hopefully she is confident and wise enough to play it on her own terms. It's not my place to see to it that she be the unconventional weirdo that I, and most of my island friends are, it's her life to figure out and this includes the world of shallow appearances, people liking or disliking her based on how she looks, and how she wants to navigate these scenes that she is certain to encounter.

A frightening thing, if I'm supposed to teach her about this stuff, not frightening at all, if I trust her, which is what unschooling is all about.