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  • Writer's pictureMarika Engelhardt

Little Miss Junior Rose Princess

Updated: Nov 13, 2019

The tights were itchy, always. The waistband, digging into the soft of my belly without mercy.

I told my mother this many times, only to be dismissed with “Yes, but you look beautiful."

Under the bright white glow of the retail light, my mother pulled dresses off racks, muttering to herself single words of assessment.

“Elegant”

”Cheap”

“Too joo joo” 

"Coquette"

Today was a familiar maternal script, but with heightened stakes. It was the week of the coveted Little Miss Junior Rose Princess, and my mother was bent on success. Thrusting an assortment of dresses at me, she bustled around the store with an air of purpose that only arose when she wanted to impress strangers. She had often told me that I was pretty, that this meant something. And she would procure this meaning in the form of prizes, approval, smiles. I would rather have been in the backyard turning over logs looking for insect life. But.


Hands in the mud were not approved.


My physique was small and gangly, with no hint of chest to come. I was a girl. But to her, I was a rose, waiting to be picked, polished, and perfected. What other use could my slim frame, doe eyes and wheat colored hair have, but to win admiration? An honest assessment would have told you the nose was average, a bit on the bulbous end of things. And that the presence was shy, the smile suffered from overbite, and the feet turned hopelessly out. I was no doll to be coached. But under her direction, this could be overlooked with the right amount of charm, cultivation, effort! And how I would turn out to grow and change only a few years later, adolescence filling in the sketch of a girl with the forms of a woman. Men saw. Attention was gained. An empty destiny of hoping to win the prize of approval. Dreams were quietly dampened, without incident like wet fingers on a candle.


But that day, I was still a girl.


Standing there, in my pink wool dress, I spoke shyly of my love for spaghetti and reading before a benign tribunal. A bowl cut in sea of perfectly inflated curls. A plague of polite. And my mother looking on anxiously, seeing me through their eyes. I lost, of course, and in a child’s way, the way you lose when life has not yet taught you that this will happen often. With genuine surprise, confusion, and hot miniature tears. On the ride home, my father (always riding in on a white horse of kindness and sanity) proclaimed me “too intellectual” and wrapped me in consolation. My mother drove quietly, chastened by the loss. We never spoke about it after that day. I now know she was taking it harder than me. My father denied requests for future pageants. Later he would say I never had any business on this stage where misguided mothers competed for vain, empty paper balloons. He would always protect me this way, with a solid, even weight of compassion and pragmatism, his life’s gift. His life’s burden.


The two walk together, it turns out. I'd learn that later.


But for now, I went back to being a girl, turning over logs and pressing my fingers joyfully into the earth. The last reprieve before crossing into adolescence. Safe, left to dream in the dirt where I felt most at home.



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