When I was a nanny, the older boy in the family spent some time identifying as a girl. He was three and luckily his mom thought it was great. His favorite getup was a hot pink towel wrapped around his head, a hot pink feather boa wrapped around his neck, white nose picker pointy high heel shoes on his feet and nothing else. He once waltzed out to say good night during a dinner his parents were hosting in said duds. To the unruffled and genuine delight of his amazing mother and the awesome embarrassment of his well-intentioned father, the boy girl appeared in birthday suit, plus plush accoutrements. I watched the many emotions play themselves out over a butter lettuce salad and a beautiful piece of fish. I gave a small sigh. You just can’t encourage gender bending at a business dinner without a justified fear of the family meeting.

The next morning, at the same table, I advocated in favor of toddler transvestitism using the following argument, “If you don’t let him do it now, he’ll be doing it when he’s thirty.� I thought this a neat and cheeky reply to the father’s petty protests. What could be the harm in a pink boa, really? I get a kick out of cross dressers; I love the pageantry of passing and the inherent reminder that we all play at our identity, sexual and otherwise. I love to see what people come up with in the “self� category. My only caveat being bad drag. Give me the sexy shims at the club, give me boys in heels and wigs, give me girls in trucks and straight-leg Levi’s, but please lord spare me the house coat and five o’clock shadow. Ain’t nobody into ugly. I thought my opinion was so urban, so…open minded. I thought I had a point. I thought I was hip to the theater of the self, to the politics of identity pastiche. And maybe I was. But I was also missing the point.

The father was expressing his fear. My charge was his first born son and he had an identity in mind for the boy. The ideal obviously involved neither pink nor feathers, turbans nor nakedness. While I approached the son in play, as if in a game of fantasy and semantics, the father approached him in stern determination. As a parent, I can now see how I operated then - with a lack of understanding and a carefully crafted misunderstanding. I don’t think I was mature enough to face the enormity of the task of parenting. I still clung to my hours, the children were my job and not my life. I flippantly skimmed along the emotional depths of parenting, refusing to allow that identity might be a sticking point for me as well. I didn’t really get it until now.

I have recently encountered the “Princess Phase.� My daughter spent the first two years of her life in boy’s hand-me-downs from the mid eighties. She never wore pastels nor watched Disney. I was careful to gender bend and blur at every play opportunity. My daughter lives with two women who wear pants. She is my daughter, the daughter of a devoted, self-declared feminist and yet still, she has developed a passion for princesses. She wants to see them, she wants to be them, she wants to wear their dresses. The hinges of my mind rust shut. All the years of theory and forward thinking come to a grinding, stubborn, mulish halt. I cannot accept the princess thing. I do not agree, I do not accept. I object!

By my own logic, I should indulge her chosen identity so that at age thirty, my daughter is not donning square dancer duds and heading out to kiss frogs. This should be the “princess empowerment phase.� I should enable my daughter’s inner princess and allow her to play at whatever person she needs to be. What I know about the Magic Kingdom’s shady politics and cultural corruption should not be the limiting factor. What I know about girls and silence and self-esteem should stay my hand. I should embrace this phase in all its puffy, pink, spinning, and sparkling glory. I should appreciate the pageantry and the pastiche of my own inner princess. I should, for the love of god, at least play along. But the princess shtick makes me feel sick with its sticky, prissy cotton candy palette. I can’t help it - I don’t want her wearing tiaras and tiered dresses with lace overlays. I don’t want her wearing purple bejeweled plastic fuck-me pumps with feathers. I don’t want to call her “Cinderella, or Belle or Sleepy Beauty.� I don’t want to be caught in the good mother/bad mother dichotomy as my daughter wanders the woods turning and bending curtsies to the birds.

I want my daughter to be tough and smart and dirty. I want her to be loud and crass, insistent and savvy. I want her to care about human rights and social justice and the fate of the universe, not armored knights, social functions and the fate of the pink sparkly purse. Can’t she be a firefighter or a dinosaur or an insect of some kind? I’d be happy with a puppy, a kitty, a dragon, maybe even a queen. Can’t she aspire to some other antithesis of all that I am? But no, the princess it is. Why does it bother me so much? She is after all, tough and smart and dirty, regardless of her dress. She is loud and she is insistent and she is savvy. And now that she can properly used the phrase, “damn it!� I can say with assurance that she is also crass. Regardless of her dress.

The dress, in fact, is only a limiting factor for me. My daughter does everything in a dress. As soon as we walk through the door at her preschool she strips naked and heads for the play house. There they have a mad assortment of old party dresses and hand-me-down lingerie. Once in costume, she continues with her day, swinging, digging, riding trikes, painting pictures, reading books, climbing, fighting, nursing, crying, napping, screaming, laughing and spinning and spinning and spinning. It’s as if the princess dress facilitates her day. So who am I to say no? Who am I to decide that the princess thing is a hindrance, holding her back? Perhaps I am holding us back. I forget that now, and for a little while yet, my daughter’s epistemology is mainly composed of me. I am the main source for information and discernment. I have been, till lately, the last say, the only say. With this in mind, maybe the problem isn’t the princess but the parent.

Parenting, and mothering in particular, can feel like such a raw deal. There is so much to do and clean and organize and read and cook and make and fix in my every day and no one does it but me. If I don’t do it, whatever it is, it will mostly likely not get done. There is only so much I can delegate to my two-year-old. I am, by default, for better or worse, in control. So now, when she makes a move to take control, am I reacting with a dictatorial negative. I immediately think, “Hey honey, that’s my job! I have gotten you dressed several time a day, for every day of your life. Since when do you dress yourself?� The answer, spoken clearly and in many passionate moments is, “Since right now, now hand me that lacey getup and those furry little accidents and get out of my way!�

She has imposed a moratorium on pants. It is now tights and “spinning dresses� or nothing at all. “Nothing at all� used to be my daughter’s modus operandi. She’s stripped naked at the slightest provocation. Now, to be precise, it is “tights and a spinning dress� or else. If I force the pants thing or, god forbid, one of the dresses is in the dryer, the possession begins. My sweet baby girl grows horns and her head spins around and she spews green vomit. I hear voices from the dark side speaking through her tiny mouth, demanding a new dress. I am inconsolable. There is no way that a new spinning dress can be my child’s reson d’ etre. But it is, and perhaps, it isn’t.

Maybe my girl will be a girly girl. Maybe she will be, like me, shy and retiring by nature. Is that what I fear? That only a supreme effort will buy her the ability to speak up? Am I nervous that she’ll be crippled by what people might presume to think of her in pink? Am I afraid that she’ll be hobbled by misogyny and a foreshortened Achilles’ tendon? Yes, and rightly so. These have happened to me, they will probably happen to her. What will be the cure? Well, to begin, she will need to feel confident making her own decisions. She’ll need to believe that what she likes, and that what she thinks, is valid and has a rightful place in the world. She’ll need to believe that I love her even when we disagree. She’ll need to be able to get out of bed and get dressed for her day. She need to be able to defend her decisions and yes, to discern the revolutionary power of play and artful pastiche. So, if she has something to say, at two, and she needs the princess phase to say it, well…okay.

My solace, here in the bowels of the princess phase, is a pair of red boots. With her spinning dress and tights, my daughter usually wants to wear a pair of red boots. Bright red boots with reinforced toes. Awesome red ankle boots that she can run in and splash in and put on herself. Boots, by the way, that I picked out. I take it one day at a time. It requires an enormous reserve of strength to indulge my wee princess, to let her be who she wants to be, to let her try on an identity I loathe, in the comfort and safety of our own home. When I sit down to my sewing machine tonight, to mend her tutu and, in compromise, make a new spinning skirt, I will have those red boots in my mind’s eye. I will add the image of those boots to my permanent collection.