Closet for Two

As an only child, I experienced a not-insignificant amount of wistful longing for a sibling while growing up. Above all, I wanted a sister – though, in truth, what I wanted was a built-in best friend. Because it’s hard to make friends when you’re an introvert and a teenager and your life is entirely uprooted not once but twice within the space of a few years. Of course, having a sibling is no guarantee of harmonious companionship, but I didn’t know that at the time, what with being an only child and having no friends. There is nothing to say that, had I had a sister, we would have (happily) shared the same interests or opinions. Much less the same closet, although I dreamed that dream for a long time. In any event, my idealized expectations of female bonding rituals, nourished by books, magazines, and TV, never had the chance to rub up against prosaic realities. My mom was never especially interested in fashion or makeup, and I never lived with roommates (until I met my husband, whose interest in those things is also essentially nil.) For more than 30 years, I was the undisputed queen of my realm. And by realm, I mean my closet. I loved fashion and I painstakingly built a little universe around it. OK, maybe not so little. And if there was nobody in my day-to-day life with whom I could share bits of that universe, well … that’s what this blog was for — whose added bonus is that none of you have ever asked to borrow a pair of shoes and forgotten to return it.

And then I had a daughter.

There were many reasons why, before she was born, I hoped to have a daughter. I wouldn’t say that they were bad reasons but, for the most part, those reasons are not the same reasons why, today, I am grateful that I have a daughter. Life teaches you things you had no idea that you didn’t know or understand – not just about the world and what’s important in it, but about yourself. (Maybe those are two sides of the same coin.) One of things I had hoped for, before my daughter was born, was that we might share the sort of connection that my mom and I didn’t really have when I was growing up – one forged in common interests and experiences. I knew that it wasn’t a given simply by virtue of biology, but that didn’t stop me from hoping it might happen.

The answer wasn’t obvious from the jump, as such things rarely are. One of the joys of parenthood has been watching my kids’ personalities slowly unfold before my eyes. As a parent, one’s role in that process is a curious one: not wholly a spectator, not unilaterally a director, often on the spot but never in the spotlight. Something of a Jill-of-all-trades, hoping always for the best and being frequently surprised by what ends up transpiring during the performance – because there’s no dress rehearsal, of course. Anyway, in the fullness of time, it became clear that I had been granted my wish. My daughter is a chip off the old block; that block being me, to be precise. She loves to draw and read, and her “happy place” is the library; she has a weakness for accessories and plans her outfit the night before. We are two peas in a pod.

Well, sort of.

One of the most emotionally fraught transitions of parenthood – less immediately tumultuous than the arrival of a brand-new human being in one’s life, but no less profound in consequence – is the emergence of boundaries. For the first few years of their lives, my kids felt as much a part of me as they had been while in utero. Like an extra appendage tacked onto my body, sometimes quite literally. I don’t know exactly when this started to change; it happened so gradually, I hardly noticed. But there came a day when it hit me: my kids are people. I know that sounds silly – what else would they be? – but the reality of that, as a parent, is different from the abstract concept. So, then: my daughter is a person, with her own opinions and her own perspective on things … including those things that we have in common. She loves books, but she likes different books from me. She loves clothes, but she doesn’t like wearing all the same things I do. (She also likes leaving her, and some of my, clothes on the floor, which gives me the vapours, but I digress.) Our convergences bring me joy but so, too, do our divergences. She is her own person, and getting to know that person is a delight and a privilege. She is constantly surprising me, testing and enriching my view of the world.

And that is the reality against which my childhood dream of “playing closet” with a confidant is unfolding. It’s fun and it’s challenging all at the same time because, unlike the imaginary sister I used to conjure up in my mind when I was young, my actual daughter isn’t always agreeable to playing by my rules. The things she wants to borrow from me are only sometimes the things I’m willing to lend, and almost never the things I would pick out for her. Her track record of returning things in a timely manner is spotty, and I expect it will only get worse with time. Occasionally, she asks for my opinion or help with her outfits, and sometimes she even implements it. I can foresee a day, in the not-so-distant future, when I’ll be on the receiving end of an (unsolicited) opinion on my outfit, and I am hard at work mentally preparing myself for that particular paradigm shift.

But I love it. I love seeing her explore her identity and her creativity. I love hearing her opinions, and the way in which she expresses them. It’s wonderful, and it’s bittersweet. She is my daughter and she is becoming herself. In the clothes we share, we have a common language. We are writing our story, but also our own stories. It’s not precisely what I had dreamed of, all those years ago — it’s infinitely better.