Not so itsy-bitsy bikinis

It was good to see Primark recall their padded bikinis recently. I'm sure no-one would dream of selling padded swimming trunks to boys of seven.

Perhaps Primark (and other retailers) would like to revise some of the writing on their t-shirts for two year olds next.

Dan Garavelli writing in the Scotsman maintains that, 'Even more damaging than the sexual aspect of many fashion lines, in my opinion, is the way they are designed to limit girls' horizons; to present them as a bunch of silly bimbos. So there are T-shirts with slogans such as 'I left my brain in my locker', 'Future Footballer's Wife' or 'Catwalk Ready'.

I don’t want my little girl parading about in a bikini stuffed with padding. Equally, I don’t want her going through life with her brain stuffed with fluff.

True stories

Last night I went to watch Sam play his guitar in a concert. I had to take all four children with me as Neil was working late. In the past this would have given me palpations, but fortunately they are at an age now where they can enjoy a concert. Sam had to be at the concert early, so we arrived 40 minutes before it was due to start and were able to sit in the front row. Daniel and Jo played on their DSis while we waited. Alice had hoped to play on Jo’s old gameboy. Jo plugged it in to charge when he got home from school, but he didn’t have time to press the switch on the plug because he needed to go outside and practice free kicks (this explanation made perfect sense to him and he gave it straight faced when the gameboy battery ran out after just 10 seconds). Fortunately I had several pens in my bag and I handed the concert tickets to Alice and told her to draw on the back of them. She told me to sit very still because she was going to draw a picture of me.

I wasn’t allowed to look at the picture while she was drawing it, so I stared straight ahead and ended up tuning in to the conversation of a mother and daughter behind us. The daughter spoke in a loud, self-conscious voice, aware that people might be listening, striving it seemed, to humiliate her mother. The mother responded in flat, weary tones, making no comment as to her daughter’s rudeness. The mother ruined everything, was irritating and needed to just stop talking – doh. It was the mother’s fault that the daughter couldn’t see (they were in the second row) but when the mother offered to change seats the daughter refused. The daughter’s complaints were interspersed with look-at-me comments: I just LOVE these shoes, I need to lose half a stone, I don’t know how I’m going to dance in my prom dress.

I started to feel a bit queasy – how long before I get to enjoy the pleasure of being spoken to like that? I thought.

I broke Alice's rules and looked down at her just as she was waving the pen at me, counting.

‘What are you counting?’ I asked.

‘Your spots,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ I replied. I watched as she began to draw spots on the picture of me. ‘Do you have to draw the spots?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is a proper picture. But I’ve only drawn five and you’ve actually got thirteen spots. Stop looking.’

I was happy to stop looking at the picture and tuned back in to the conversation behind me which was progressing nicely. The mother had the temerity to smooth a piece of the daughter’s hair down and was told to get off. Some boys sat down next to the daughter: her volume increased accordingly. There’s no way I’d let you chaperone me at the prom mum, no way. You’re too embarrassing. The mother didn’t reply: if such an offer had been made it hadn’t been made at the concert.

I hazarded another glance at Alice’s picture. It seemed to be almost finished, however I noticed that she had only drawn the top part of my glasses frame in two thick lines just above my eyebrows. ‘There’s no eye bits in my glasses,’ I said.

‘They’re not glasses,’ she replied. ‘They’re lines. You’ve got lots of them on your forehead, but I’ve just drawn two.’

‘Oh.’ I took the pen off her and drew a circle around each eye to connect with the lines, making them into glasses. ‘That’s better,’ I said.

‘You’ve spoilt it now,’ she moaned.

A tiny part of me wanted to explain that the spots and the lines on my forehead are new to me, that I wasn’t expecting them, that they have snuck up on me since her birth and I was hoping that she wouldn’t notice. A small part of me felt irritated by the smooth, thick plain of her forehead and the scrutinising eyes underneath, determined to observe the truth of my appearance. Another part of me wanted to laugh at both of us.

I thanked her for the picture, put it in my bag and asked her to draw another one. She drew a picture of us standing next to each other. This time she didn’t look at me. There weren’t any spots or lines, but I seemed to be missing an eye.

She knelt on her chair and held up the picture. ‘Look,’ she said.
The people behind us could see the picture. ‘It’s me and mum,’ she said.

I glanced back over my shoulder and smiled at the mother and daughter. The mother’s face was scrubbed shiny with tiredness, her hair unruly and frizzed. The daughter slouched in her seat, angled away from her mother; beautiful, but awkward, fidgeting with her cardigan. They smiled back.

Not long after the lights went down, Alice crept onto my lap, leaving her seat empty, improving the view for the girl behind us. As Sam serenaded the hall with his classical guitar music, Alice planted a warm kiss on the back of one of my hands and perhaps the girl behind us inched a little closer to her mother too – if this was one of my stories that’s how I would end it.

Hurrah for Tomboys!

Sometimes life isn’t funny the first time around, that’s why it helps to write about it. In the story that I was working on last week I wrote about a little girl who wore swimming trunks to a swimming lesson and then wished that she hadn’t. The swimming trunk part of the story was actually true. Alice did wear a pair of her brother’s trunks to a swimming lesson.

With three older brothers it is probably not surprising that Alice has turned into something of a tomboy. She steadfastly refuses to wear skirts or dresses and given half a chance she would have her hair cut like a boy – if it wasn’t so wispy and fine I might just let her. It seems that she is part of a dying breed. Stephanie Theobald pays tribute to tomboys in her piece in the Guardian, ‘Hurrah for Tomboys!’ Theobald laments the fact that ‘Nickelodeon recently redesigned the Dora doll to make her more "feminine" (read "profitable"). Instead of being equipped with tools, map and backpack, her new accessories include halter-tops, tiaras and glittery hairbrushes.’ This article discusses the trend towards accessories and clothes like those now worn by Dora and takes a look at the clothes that famous little girls are wearing. It made me feel pretty good about the tracksuits, jeans, t-shirts and hoodies that Alice chooses to spend her weekends and holidays wearing.

Once she was standing on the poolside, Alice changed her mind about wearing her brother’s trunks. As a parent I hate situations in which I can’t make things better. We had to settle for an experience that probably comes under the ‘learning a lesson’ category: it’s okay to wear your brother’s trunks at the beach where you don’t know anyone, but in the pool with all the other girls wearing their pink frilly stuff you might feel a bit daft was probably the lesson learned. And yet if she wants to wear the blasted trunks again I’ll let her. I'll just remember to pack her (blue, frill-less) costume as well.

Who do you think you are?

Yesterday was my daughter’s 6th birthday. Without being too sentimental about it, I think that my daughter is fabulous. I alternately feel overjoyed and overwhelmed by her fabulousness (I think I may have made that word up, but it’s been a long week, so I don’t care). I always imagined myself with daughters. Sometimes I imagine things because I want them to happen but other times I imagine things as a way of warding them off, as a form of vaccination. My imaginings about daughters have been largely hopeful: after my daughter Libby’s death I thought I would never get to see a daughter grow up.

Libby’s life exhausted my imagination for some time. There was a moment following her birth when I revelled in my good fortune. I can still see the view out of the hospital window, the back of the midwife as she wrote Elizabeth on the hospital tags – a name Libby was supposed to grow into. Until recently, if it was possible, I would have chosen to press pause at that moment, that I’m the luckiest person in the world moment and keep everything as it was right then, before the day was split by sirens, before unfamiliar imaginings crept around new words: brain damage, cataracts, lumbar puncture, ventilation, transfusion, critical...


All of my recent writing seems to be about mothers and daughters, I don’t know why, it’s just coming out that way. After Alice was born I was determined to snatch my second chance and make something wonderful of it. When I write about mothers and daughters I often use the writing as a way of discarding my pessimistic imaginings. Three recent stories contain alternate versions of my real life experience with daughters and I’m itching to write more.

This week I read Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? Munro’s exploration of mother/daughter relationships is wonderful. I took the book with me on the morning of Alice's birthday when my Gran asked me to drive her to the doctor’s. I took it with me as I drove her straight to the hospital after the doctor had listened to her heart. I clutched the book on my lap all morning and afternoon as I watched her shrink into the hospital bed. I read it as I waited outside the x-ray room. I folded the corner of a page over as I told the hospital porter of course she is fine on her feet, you should see her on a bike, but even I doubted the truth of my words as my imagination crept around her silence and smallness. Her, I don’t want to die yet was met with assurances that I was unqualified to give, but gave anyway, sliding into mother mode.

We spent the evening at the hospital, Alice blew out her candles at home then off we went, armed with knitting magazines, chocolate éclairs and jelly babies. After visiting time was over, I dashed off to university to catch the end of a reading by visiting author Nicholas Royle. When I arrived, he was describing a story that his mother told him about women searching for amber on the beach. I thought about the stories my mother told me and the stories I tell in turn. I took my Gran home from the hospital this afternoon; that she didn’t tell any stories is a mark of how tired she was. When I said goodnight to Alice last night I told her the story of when she was born, it is one of her favourites: it is one of my favourites.

The urge to press pause at a perfect moment in life has passed, the present is too absorbing to countenance it. Before I went to bed I finished Who Do You Think You Are? In typical Munro fashion, the ending of the book takes the reader back to Rose’s childhood before catapulting her into the future. This technique allows the reader to see that Rose is many things – daughter, mother, lover, sister, child – all at once: she is an accumulation of her experiences. Tomorrow I’m hoping to start work on a story about a violin and an aging relative: it will be a case of examining my accumulated experiences and employing the vaccinating kind of imagination: describing things that I hope never happen. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a hopeful interlude at some point involving the appearance of an utterly fabulous daughter.

Girl Talk

The pink stinks campaign has got me thinking.

I’ve muddled my way through my three boys' early years without much thought of any damage I might be inflicting, not much consideration of role models or gender stereotyping. One of them adores football, another science fiction and the third is happy to refer to himself as a geek: he declares it with some pride. There appears to be room under the umbrella of masculinity for all three of them and their disparate interests and activities.

But it seems to be different for girls. They are bombarded with frivolity and insubstantial role models in the form of fairies, princesses, queens, angels and the unfortunately proportioned Barbie.

Look at these national literacy magnet sets.

Look at the verbs. The boys get climbing, swinging, running, racing and swimming. The girls, cooking, dancing and skipping. The boys have their imaginations stimulated by monsters, dragons, wizards, dinosaurs, treasure and ghosts. The girls get fairies, magic, princess and angels. While the boys’ list includes the nouns helicopter, aeroplane, tractor, scooter, lawnmower and football, the girls are subjected to clothes, lipstick, glitter, handbags, bunnies and FLUFF. This focus on appearance, on the exterior, sits uncomfortably alongside the fact that almost 50% of girls aged 5-8 want to be slimmer (British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2005 study).

I have a daughter. Recently, we painted her doll’s house bright pink and I know for a fact that Father Christmas has bought equally pink furniture to ensure a complete refurbishment on December 25th, but that’s not really the issue, not for me at least (although I did suggest that she might prefer to paint it red). I worry about raising her in an environment where her gender is used as an insult: ‘don’t be such a girl’ ‘you big girl’s blouse’ ‘you old woman’ etc. I feel obliged to provide some sort of foil to the version of femininity that is paraded in front of her every time she watches television or sets foot in a supermarket. Her brother Jo used to play tennis, if he played badly his coach would humiliate him by shouting ‘Josephine’ across the court, illustrating to all the children present that failure is feminine; to be compared to a girl is the ultimate humiliation.

I don’t know what the answer is, other than to provide a counter to the bubbles and fluff: worms, skeletons, snails, sticks, dirt, conkers and frogs – watch out Alice, they’re coming your way.

Recording Angels

I took my notebook to the school nativity this year. When I pulled it out of my handbag along with a pen, the woman next to me asked, 'what are you doing?' For the first time ever my children’s school has banned photography during performances. Filming is also prohibited. 'I'm recording the performance,' I replied. 'I'm not allowed to take pictures or film it, so I'm going to write about it instead.'

I arrived at the school early so that I could get a good seat. On entering the hall I discovered that the front row was littered with RESERVED signs. Five minutes before the performance began a stream of people, very tall people it seemed, entered the hall and sat down in front of me.

I watched Jo recite a poem. He was supposed to recite the first third, but managed to be subversive by memorising the entire thing and reciting it all. I watched Daniel recite a poem, enunciating every word, with great seriousness. But I was really there to watch Alice. For the first time I was there to watch an angel.

Alice appeared in a white dress, doused with tinsel and smiles. I've watched my boys be innkeepers, shepherds, donkeys, wise men and last year a particularly ferocious Herrod, but this angel thing was new to me. And it got me thinking. Most girls want to be Mary. At my children’s school you can only be Mary if you are in year 2. Alice is in year 1. So what other parts are available to her? Well, there's the part of an angel. There are a couple of slots as an innkeeper’s wife, perhaps even a chance to be a wise man if the school is so inclined, but the possibilities are rather restricted. It occurred to me that the parts for girls are not aspirational. A girl cannot be the mother of god when she grows up and no matter how appealing the idea is to her parents, she will not achieve an immaculate conception. She is also unlikely to be an angel or a man (whether wise or foolish) when she reaches adulthood.

I watched Alice dance angel dances on the staging blocks, squashed by the angel Gabriel, bunches flapping on either side of her tinsel halo, her dimple punctuating every smile. I couldn't write fast enough. I wanted to photograph her earnestness with words. As I scribbled in my notepad, it occurred to me that angels are like writers. They don't play much of a part in the story; they record, announce, summarise and witness. They watch the action unfold from their privileged vantage point, then sing beautiful songs about it. It occurred to me that the job of an angel might not be so bad, after all.

At the conclusion of the nativity we listened to 'One fousand, fousand Christmas lights' - that's what they sang, at least. The head informed us that the school would be filming the performance the following day, presumably to sell to the parents. I wrote a strong protest in my notepad. Then I grabbed my little angel and took a sneaky photograph.