Daughters

As the mother of two girls, now happily way past the middle teenage years of experimenting with everything - clothes, hair, make-up, music, love, sex, self - I read this article by Caitlin Moran today with a lump in my throat. It's such a tricky passage to negotiate, the burgeoning physical maturity paired with a lack of experience that only time can provide. It needs so much encouragement, and trust, love and tolerance even when inside, and sometimes outside, you're screaming "No, no, no, you CAN'T go out looking like that!" Yet every physical manifestation however weird or wonderful is an expression of them, not you, and you marvel at their creativity, their imagination, and their courage to go against the grain and be different, to look amazing in unexpected or unsuitable ways. We had it all at one time or another, the teeny tiny skirts, Doc Martins painted fluorescent pink, oversized men's jackets and skimpy tops, kohl-black eyes and garish lipsticks, caked-on foundation. They have to find their own level, discover who they are, what kind of things they like, what type of person they want to be, what their boundaries are. It ain't easy, as any parent of adolescent daughters will testify. But it's absolutely fascinating, watching them grow out of childhood, listening to their arguments, agreeing with them when you can and countering them when you think it wise. Oh, they teach you so much, these young women who may appear to be sure of themselves but are really testing everything, especially you. If they're half scared of their developing bodies and the power they bring, it's nothing on your fear for them. But your pride when they turn into unique individuals with principles you admire and skills you envy, that's the reward. So thank you Caitlin, you mother superior you.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/caitlin-moran-listen-up-girls-m6jrlz82p

And just in case that link doesn't work with the pay-as-you-go Times website, here it is in full for the record:
“Mum, how do I look?”
I look my daughter up and down. She’s wearing mum jeans with turn-ups, brogues, a shirt printed with spaceships, and a second-hand, bottle-green Burberry mac she found in a charity shop. She recently dyed her hair white-blonde, and she’s wearing a Second World War-style red lipstick. She looks like Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, about to visit a library to borrow The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I could not be more proud of this look.
She looks so wonderful, in fact, that I am going to crack out one of my two peak descriptors.
“Ah man, that looks ace. You look really, really … comfortable.”
Her face immediately takes on the unmistakable expression of a 15-year-old girl who is sorely disappointed by her mother. For those who don’t have 15-year-old daughters, and have never seen this expression, let me assure you: you’ll know it when you see it. Nature has designed it to be distinct.
She leaves the room. I hear her go up to talk to her younger sister.
“ … And she said, ‘Ooooh, that looks comfortable,’ ” I hear her relate.
“Oh God, I know,” her younger sister commiserates. “Yesterday, when I asked her what she thought of what I was wearing, she said, ‘Oh, that is jolly.’ ”
Lovely girls, let me tell you why I will never call you “hot”, “on fleek” or “bang on trend”. Let me tell you why “comfortable” and “jolly” are the two best things a young woman can be told she looks.
By and large, being in possession of a female body is not a comfortable thing. Onto your basic skeleton, Nature has strapped two wibbly-wobbly hassle magnets (your breasts), and inserted some mad blood cupboard in thrall to the Moon, which explodes every 30 days or so (your uterus). Nature has also made you a couple of inches smaller than the half of the population that generally invents things – so you’ll spend your whole life putting your back out trying to lift cases into luggage racks, and using kitchen worktops so high you feel like an Oompa-Loompa.
The majority of your clothes revolve around items that function by way of a textile sudoku: they will tax your ability to puzzle abstract concepts to the limit. Remember the first time you tried to work out how to fasten a bra clasp, putting your arm sockets in a stress position more commonly used in torture? Or the first time you put on Spanx, an experience not unlike trying to punch a gigantic flesh balloon into a compression sock?
I’m also going to say “crotch poppers” here – not a special kind of amyl nitrate, but an ingenious device that allows the fumble-fingered to staple their genitals with a snap fastener while in the toilets of a nightclub.
On top of this: bodycon dresses! Stack heels! The Daily Mail’s Sidebar of Shame! Waist trainers! Thongs!
In a world so loaded against female physical comfort – in a world where this word is never mentioned on fashion websites, in women’s magazines or even in conversation – instinctively to discover and embrace comfort shows you at your best: confident.
At ease. Finding your own things. That’s why “comfortable” is one of the two greatest descriptors of what a woman is wearing.
And “jolly”? Why is “jolly” good? Because “jolly” shows you’re choosing happiness as the main thing you project. It shows how clever you are, beautiful young girl – that, because science makes you happy, you want a shirt covered in spaceships. That you love old Hollywood – but the Marilyn you chose is in jeans, in Nevada, rather than drunk, fragile and unhappy in an evening gown. That you’re happier picking through a charity shop for an old Eighties coat – with your headphones on, listening to Joni Mitchell; I saw you through the window – than wishing for a credit card, or buying sweatshop tat. That you think your mouth is pretty – it is – and that is why you have painted it the colour of hard cherries.
“Jolly” means that, against all the odds, you radiate joy that you are you. The odds are stacked against you at 15 – your brain’s rewiring; your unwritten future presses down on you with all the terror and excitement with which the blank screen and the flashing cursor burden the novelist; you still haven’t worked out exactly how you sign your name. I have seen the notepads where you practise a dozen signatures, over and over again. But you like your foundations. You have a vague idea where you’re heading. And that your instinct – your bright, correct instinct – is that the person who enjoys that journey most is not coquettish, “red-carpet ready” or heroin chic, but just … “comfortable”. “Jolly.” She turns her face to the sun, and smiles.