It was Monday morning at 7:15 am and my ten year old daughter apparently didn’t hear the incessant beeping of her alarm. “Reagan, get up. You have to get ready for school.” “I knowwwwww, Mom. I’m uppppp!” She then grabbed the covers and rolled back into a burrito. And she literally was a burrito because she insisted I order her a burrito blanket off of Amazon because it’s trendy and part of an aesthetic she had seen in videos. It looks like someone put cigarettes out on it. She also likes to throw the word aesthetic around whenever she can to describe anything. “Oh, see this room I designed on Roblox? It’s a trending aesthetic.” Thanks, TikTok. More often than not, she’s using the word improperly, but she won’t believe me because I’ve tried to tell her. I mean she’s ten, she knows everything, of course.
I threw her out of her burrito. It went like this:
“Reagan!”
“What?!”
“Get up! What are you wearing today?”
She then proceeded to trudge over to her drawer, sleepy faced and with total bed head. She whipped out one of the same three t-shirts from her rotation.
“This.” She held up a boxy semi-cropped tee. “That’s cute, but you have a lot of new clothes. Let’s try some of those out so your teacher knows you have other clothes to wear and that your mom takes care of you,” I sarcastically replied. I fully admit to being paranoid about teacher judgement since having been a teacher myself.
She rolled her eyes.
I held up a different boxy tee and said, “This one is cute!” It was the kiss of death. I knew it before it left my mouth. I called her shirt cute. Rookie mistake.
“Ugh! I don’t like boxy cropped tees anymoreeeee.”
“Excuse me? Um, that shirt you just had was exactly that.”
“Noooo! The one you have says something on it. I don’t like those anymore. No one does.”
“Oh my God, what are you talking about!? Pair it with this corduroy skirt and chunky boots. That’s a 90’s vibe right there!” (as I channeled my inner Cher from Clueless)
“Mom, you don’t know 90’s!”
Well, I’ll be damned. Shut the front door. Back the truck up. She knew. She took it too far! I don’t know 90’s, you say?! Baby girl, I lived it! I had chokers! I had butterfly clips in my hair before you were even a thought! I wore sparkles on my eyes and I had “going out” halter tops that I wore with flare jeans! How dare you!? How. Dare. You. I grew up with the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. I was a Catholic school girl for Halloween every year! How dare you presume to tell me that I don’t know the 90’s?! So, I naturally went on a rant about how she thinks she knows what’s cool right now but how it’s all really stuff coming back from when I was little. I schooled her so fast on how Mariah Carey did “Fantasy” first before Latto redid it and called it “Big Energy”. Mariah was on that roller coaster singing her heart out!
“Yeah, I know that song. It’s popular on Tik Tok!”
“Nooooo, you’re missing the point! It’s from 1995 when I was in eighth grade, ya know the 90’s! They’re coming back!” I was shrieking at 7:30 am. I then proceeded to tell her that her “curtain bangs” were not something new. It wasn’t a trend that came out of nowhere! She had nothing to say, so a quiet “whatever” was mumbled. I let it go. I was about to leave the room when she said, “But didn’t you tell me that you were a nerd in high school?” It was the moment where my words were used against me. I couldn’t even get mad because I in fact was a big nerd and I had definitely joked about it with her.
“Yes, I wasssss!” I hissed back. “But it doesn’t matter because then I went to college and figured it out! I learned how to do my hair and my makeup and I learned how to be social! I was fun once! I was! I knew the trends! I knew what to wear!” At this point, she had zoned out. And I wasn’t pleading my case for looking cool very well. I told her to just trust me on the outfit and she said, “Fineeeeeeee.”
She wound up changing before the bus even came. As if!