Saturday, I was watching my daughter’s end-of-term ballet class. One caveat, she’s four years old, so this was more a mishmash of pretending to stretch like a cat, role-playing as seeds and leaves, and leaping like a princess with a scarf. Adorable stuff. Pot bellies, baby cheeks still present, and parents’ eyes glowing with joy.
And it struck me: when will the great seismic shift hit her?
For now, this is a game—dress-up for a life of fantasy in her manic pixie supernatural world where leaps are borne on fairy wings, and one is always a stunning princess. But, she’s performing for us to gawk at her, to revel in the look of her. Yes, it’s not sexualized—it’s parental pride—but in years to come, she’ll still be viewed by others as a product, a performance to judge. She will be there for others’ pleasure, identity, and fulfillment—even when she is unaware such transactions are occurring.
Even if she’s no longer on stage.
In the past year, as I was overhauling old specs and adaptations, my subconscious seemed to be priming the creative pump on this larger issue of the lifecycle of a girl. While I was consumed with drafts of angry boys and old men, I was reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas, and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Beautiful, touching bookends of thought which shaped where I’m at with a few current draft treatments.
Women—particularly elderly ones and mothers—have haunted many of my story concepts over the years. I joked that all my protagonists were iterations of my grandmothers—youthful ignorance in pre-“life,” maternal strength, or sidelined ghosts. But, in the past year I’ve been focused on the tail end of this story. Abbie in The Mess of Boys is one, Ronja in Ronja of the North, another. Both are women who were once independent, gloriously self-sufficient, but now find themselves thrown into a frailer physiology that belies their mental fire. They’re women who were shaped through their identities as caregivers, strivers, nursemaids and life coaches for the next generation. And then what…?
But mapping-out 2016 there are three more in the pipeline—perhaps they are all the same woman—but I’m now moving backwards in time: Jasmin in The Curator, a woman of my age who must start over again, her identity via relationships wiped clean. No more family. No more children. No more world as we know it. Odette, my teenager cast adrift in a life of double-standards where brothers, boyfriends, and fathers fail her. And The Princess in The Coyote, my child warrior who hasn’t been forced to see the world through only a “girl’s” eyes. The last one standing. A mere body of muscle, bone, power… and one cunning brain uncaring, for this brief window of time, that it’s not a boy or a girl. It just is.
So, with Orlando’s time-traveling path to identity, Eileen’s epilogue on forgiveness, and Joan’s meditation on relationships, I am walking into this year more aware. Or, perhaps, my daughter stepping defiantly out of babyhood is spurring me on.
Will it take her decades of puberty, hiccups, and failed attempts at do-overs to finally dance, move, and strengthen her body for herself, and her alone? Can I raise her to be aware of her own power, her own agency? Breeding awareness that loving pink, being tough, and pretending to be whomever you want to be need never stop.
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