Priorities

This morning, as I got dressed in the women’s locker room after my swim at the YMCA, I overheard a conversation between a mother and daughter. The mother teaches water aerobics classes a couple times a week, and she brings her 13-14 year old daughter to the gym, where she works out before going to school. I’ve never met either of them, but we often wind up in the locker room at the same time, where I overhear their interactions with one another. Today’s conversation—similar to conversations I’ve heard in the past—went something like this:

Daughter: Guess what you forgot to pack in my gym bag.

Mother: What?

Daughter: My toothbrush. You packed the toothpaste, but you didn’t pack my toothbrush.

Mother: Well, you probably need to get a separate toothbrush just for your gym bag. You should just keep everything in your gym bag separate from the stuff you keep in the bathroom at home.

Daughter: Well, what I’m supposed to do now?

Mother: Oh, wait! There’s a toothbrush out in the car. I’ll go get it. I don’t want to drive all the way home for you to brush your teeth.

Daughter: But who’s going to straighten my hair before we leave the Y?

Mother: You can do it.

Daughter: No, I can’t. You have to do it. If you go out to the car now, we won’t have enough time to straighten my hair.

And so on. I quit listening at that point, but when I stopped in the sink area to dry my own hair, I watched as Mother straightened Daughter’s hair.

This conversation got me thinking. First, about hair. I think my mom stopped doing my hair in elementary school. I can’t imagine speaking to her the way that this girl was speaking to her mother, as if it is her mom’s duty to pack the girl’s gym bag every night and act as her personal hairdresser every morning.

But then I started thinking about keeping up with appearances. Flat irons and hair straighteners. Who’s telling this girl that she needs to straighten her already straight hair? Her classmates? Media? Her mother? I don’t know.

The above conversation made me thankful for the lessons on independence and responsibility my own mother taught me.

I’m pretty sure that I was responsible for packing my own gym bag, lunch, suitcases, book bags, etc. by the time I got to 6th grade—probably before then. If I was missing something, it wasn’t my mommy’s fault; it was my own.

Hair. Yes, I’ve gone through phases of acquiring/using perms, hair spray, hair gel, mousse, hair dye, etc. Haven’t we all? But I’m pretty sure I stopped demanding that my mother do my hair sometime in elementary school. I actually don’t recall demanding any hair-dos from my momma after 1st or 2nd grade when she’d help me curl my hair ... but my memory isn’t all that swift, so I’ll just say that by late elementary school, I was my own personal hairdresser.

More importantly, my mom herself never really succumbed to the pressures of achieving whatever look for hair was trendy at the moment. She’s pretty much always been a wash and blow dry kind of gal, and now so am I. What’s the point of spending so much time and money on our hair? One of Andy’s friends spends $300 when she goes to the salon for a hair cut and color. I read in the New York Times that people spend $70-80 for a blow out. Do you know what a blow out is? It’s a blow dry!! They spend that kind of money for someone to blow dry their hair. That’s a student loan payment for me!!

As you can see, this mother-daughter exchange got me thinking about how we demonstrate the value we place on material things, appearances, and our interactions with the people to which we’re closest. I’d love to hear your thoughts, Fiddler Kin.