The vanity of youth

Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh,

Isn't it funny how we preen over our daughters? They end up wanting to be princesses or thinking that they are princesses by the time they're three or four...or younger...

My older daughter is four. She thinks she's a fairy. Not that she really knows what a fairy is...other than that it has wings and it's little and it's cute. So she's a fairy. Oki doki. Whatever. Of course she also thinks that she's a princess and she requires her loyal subjects to be very loyal subjects indeed. This goes for everything, but especially how she looks.

She only lets me pick out my clothes to give her final approval. She's like a little queen and I'm her lady in waiting.

Her curly hair must be VERY curly for her to okay it. She hates it when I brush the top down and just leave the curls on the ends. She tells me that she's not pretty anymore if I do that... This is a big point of contention between the two of us. It's hard to get her hair to look like I've combed it without some of the curls coming out. I've used mousse, gel and hairspray on her already just so that she comes out looking like her curls are premeditated and not just wild. One of the problems with this is that she has very slow growing hair...which she managed to cut off early last year. Her hair was very short. Very short.. It's almost shoulder length now, but with the curls, it comes to just below her ears. We're trying to let it grow out now and I hope that she doesn't decide to cut it off again. Last time she kept complaining about how she looked like a boy...

Then there's make-up and nail polish and pretty dresses, etc. She always wants pink. I don't know where that came from? She doesn't watch cartoons or television other than random classic movies, islamic cartoons, and a Adnan wa Lena. So it's not because of tv. Can she really get all of that from the toy aisles at Walmart? I just don't know. It's possible that girls are just meant to be girls. They seem to naturally gravitate towards all things girly. Which is alright by me.

I didn't find my inner girliness until after I was married. I thought that I was becoming girlier when I was in college, but then I always used to wear black and I cut my hair off, etc. The only thing that was really girlier about me was that I started wearing make-up and I kept trying to feel good in skirts (I didn't succeed with the latter).

After becoming Muslim, I started feeling better about being all dolled up and making myself look attractive. I guess the easiest part about it was that I was dressing up for my husband and (when I visited them) his family only. If I had visitors, they were usually accompanied by their husbands...so no make-up or cute clothes at those times. It's much easier to deal with only one person's opinion than with all of mankind. Call me sensitive, but I didn't want to imagine what other people thought of me or didn't think of me while passing by on the street. It made me nervous. So up until I became Muslim, my look was very natural. I never used anything other than taupes on my eyes and rosy browns or nudes on my lips. Blush was very sheer and mascara.......well...at least it looked like I had eyelashes when I used it, but I wasn't interested in really accentuating my eyes with it.

Now, I've been married almost six years. The only people who see me all full of make-up and dressed up nicely are family and close friends. I LOVE to look good. I love waking up and taking out curlers/rollers to have beautiful hair...I LOVE putting on my favorite eyeshadoes and making my eyes pop with mascara (I also use Lancome Cils Booster, no matter what mascara I use) and evening out my skin tone with real foundation. Don't get me wrong...I don't look like I'm wearing five pounds of make-up...but with red lipstick and pretty eye make-up you definately wouldn't say I was going for the natural look.

And these days, skirts and dresses make up the majority of clothes hanging in my closet. I've got some pretty galabiyyas and I have some cute pants...but I guess that I'm just more dressy these days.

I've started to dislike most things "fleece" and all things make out of sweatshirt material. I'm sure that if they're tailored correctly (there are some nice jackets at F21) they could be mildly attractive and put together...they're just not my kind of thing.

So maybe it's me that's wearing off on my daughter (and probably daughters)...I can't say I'm very much into pink, but I do have my own idiosyncracies about the way I dress and the way I look. I even got the contact lenses that you can wear continuously all month, because I don't like the way I look in glasses with hijab...I'm really horrible about taking out my contacts and used to leave them in far tooooooo long.

I hope that I'm not giving my daughters the wrong impression, though. I try to be healthy...and I hope I'm making it clear to them that I only make myself up, because it makes me feel good. It's not something that I do for other people. They must know this, because when I do out, I'm covered nearly from head to toe without make-up or frills. I do not choose to allow random strangers to judge me based on the current beauty ideal. But as unimportant as it is what strangers might think about the way I look, I want them to know that it's important to look nice for the people we love. Our families and our friends. It shows respect.

An example. If a wife/mother/daughter doesn't make herself look nice at home, what does it say? If she's not sick or exhausted from something unusual...that not only is she herself not worth putting out the effort to make herself look nice, but that her family isn't worth her making the effort either.

So as an end to this rambling, I guess I'll say that it's okay that my daughter thinks she's a princess and a fairy. It's okay for her to have certain expectations about the way she looks. At least it shows that she cares.

Fi aman Allah.