She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts

Meditations on mothering a tweenage Swiftie

In my middle school, we called them preps¹.

The uniform was Guess jeans, Keds sneakers, and an oversized Esprit bag. The hair was permed, and the bangs were big (but not too big).

When I was in sixth grade, I wanted to be one of them — or, at least, I thought I did. I came into middle school feeling unsure of everything, a tiny fish in what felt like an enormous pond, looking for some place that felt safe.

It seemed safe to try to fit in; to try to look and act like everyone else. But it was hard. I was teased for not wearing socks with my Keds, for sitting up super straight in chorus, for my thick hair that my mom (wisely) would not let me perm. Truth be told, I never quite managed to fit in all the way. 

At the end of sixth grade, when everyone² suddenly³ started wearing neon windbreakers, I told my mom that I needed one. I convinced her that this windbreaker would, in fact, come in handy on our upcoming family vacation (three weeks in England and France). This was either a convincing enough argument, or she just took pity on me, because we went to the Galleria to get me a windbreaker. But when we got to the store, I realized I didn’t actually want a neon one, and picked out one that was periwinkle blue instead. Even when I had the chance to get it right, I somehow couldn’t do it. 

And our trip abroad changed me. I studied the fashions I saw and reported back to my best friend via postcard. I told her about the wild tights for sale at the Sock Shop in London — tie-dyed tights, tights with one acid-green leg and one violet leg, black-and-white striped tights, fishnet tights that looked like cobwebs. I wrote to her about the gauzy peasant blouses and round John Lennon-style sunglasses I saw in Paris.

And by the time I got back home, I had realized that I no longer wanted to fit in. On that trip, my sister had told me, “You know, you don’t have to wear what everyone else wears. You can just wear what you want to wear,” and that changed me. It was a simple concept, obviously, but a powerful one nonetheless.

I would have moved heaven and earth to look like Poppy Z. Brite in 1992

From then on, I looked down on the preps. I’ll be honest: I thought I was better than them. I thought I had figured something out that they didn’t know; that I had evolved beyond the need for Guess jeans. This was an unkind view of things, but one that made sense to my underdeveloped 12-year-old brain. I felt that I had crossed over a divide, with the preppy girls on one side, doing choreographed lip syncs together to “Mr. Sandman” in the school talent show and wearing matching outfits, and me on the other, wearing weird tights and shoplifting black lipstick from the drugstore. 

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My daughter is 12 now, and in one of those curveballs that parenting continues to throw at you, I am slowly realizing that she is going through middle school on the other side of this divide. And I can safely say that this is a scenario I never, in my wildest dreams, imagined. 

When I first realized⁴ she was drifting into prep territory, my initial feeling was one of panic. I felt intensely protective — not of her, but of the other kids. The kids like me. The ones who didn’t have the right shoes or hairstyle or whatever. The ones who had decided to go their own way and who were no longer willing to conform. Was she being mean to them? Excluding them? Was she a mean girl?

It is a weird feeling, as a parent, to feel like you identify more with someone else’s kid than you do with your own. The fact that my kid is actually an entirely separate person than me, with her own way of existing in the world completely different than mine, continues to surprise me⁵ at each new turn as she grows up. I had always thought that, if we were kids together, we’d be friends. But now I don’t know.   

What makes me most uncomfortable is confronting what 12-year-old me would think of 12-year-old her. It’s likely that I wouldn’t have been kind. It’s likely that I would have thought that she and her friends were just brainless trend-followers, incapable of independent thought, less intelligent than me because of the clothes they wear. And it stings to face up to how judgmental I was at her age.

Fortunately for literally everyone, I am not 12 anymore, but having a kid in middle school is definitely bringing up some core memories that I would just as soon have forgotten. And it’s also bringing up some questions.

For example: how does one parent a normie kid? All the conversations I had rehearsed in my head have turned out to be moot. Had she needed advice about what to do if she accidentally-on-purpose tricked the entire school into believing she was a Satanist⁶, I would have been ready. She may yet need my advice about what to do if you and your BFF stop speaking to each other due to some weird, unspoken dynamics around popularity. But it’s not looking like I will have to comfort her after a kid⁷ completely unknown to her looks her up and down, stares her dead in the eye and says “I hope you f**king die, you freak.”

Of course, we’re less than one-third of the way into this whole middle school experiences, so all those joyful moments may still be ahead of us. I didn’t make my first faux-ritual sacrifice until I was at least in seventh grade, so there’s still plenty of time for things to get weird.

1. I’m told that “preppy” means something different to The Youth of Today than it did in 1989, which is unsurprising but also I haven’t quite figured it out. So for the purpose of this piece, I’m using “prep” and “preppy” in a thoroughly GenX manner 

2. Not actually everyone, obviously, but I use the word here because a) I am sure that’s what I told my mom, and b) that’s what it felt like at the time. What I really meant by “everyone” was, “The kids with the most social capital,” but I hadn’t learned about social capital yet, so I probably just rolled my eyes and shrugged

3. This is still a mystery to me. How did they all know to start wearing them? Did one kid get one, and it just sort of spread, like the rumor about how Audra M. and Frank A. supposedly french-kissed at the end of lunch? Was there a sale at Mervyn’s on neon windbreakers? I never figured this part out

4. There were many clues, her love of Taylor Swift being one of them, but the most telling part is how much she loves being in middle school, a sentiment that I find incomprehensible

5. I know this is obvious and I should not be surprised! But somehow I still am, every time

6. 0/10 do not recommend this 

7. True story from my own middle school days. To add insult to injury, this kid was in SIXTH GRADE and I was in EIGHTH. The audacity!!