Originally appeared in The News & Observer:
Smug in Pamperless ignorance, the childless stare open-mouthed at crusty-nosed children - their shorts dirty and two-summers too small, their laceless shoes flopping - and vow to never, ever let future young ones out of the house looking like that.
But they will.
One day they'll have a Lion King pantie day and the full weight of enlightenment will smack them between their baggy, bloodshot eyes.
On this Monday, Round One is over the juice. I get the red cup down from the cabinet. Sierra wants the blue. Round Two? The butter on her toast melts before she sees it, which means, to my 3-year-old anyway, that it never existed and has to be reapplied.
Without comment, I slather more butter onto the limp bread. She thinks she has scored a technical knockout, but I'm merely gathering my strength for Round Three: The clothes.
The book says give your child some control, a choice between Outfit A and Outfit B, and everyone will have lovely self-esteem. Sierra, of course, prefers Outfit None-of-the-Above. She wants to leave on her Beauty and the Beast pajamas.
But then she races to her bedroom and grabs the purple shorts and the purple T-shirt from the floor. This would be the purple shorts she has worn during her nap every day for a week because she always changes her clothes the minute I shut the door. And the purple T-shirt, a gift, has one of those tacky sayings on it that I avoid at all cost when buying children's clothes.
Lovingly, yet firmly, I tell her not in this lifetime. The wailing begins.
I wrestle off the pajamas, then notice the panties - panties she has had on since her Saturday night bath. After two days of "Did you wipe?" and "Uh-uh," the panties must go. Unfortunately, this is the last pair in the new three-pack Lion King panties - the other two are in a wad on top of the washer.
I get out the Bugs Bunny. No dice. Tweety Bird? Uh-uh.
Lion King! Only Lion King will do!
Armed with the Tweety Birds, I plan my attack on her flailing legs as she screams. A battle I should have waived? I don't know. Dirty panties won't kill a child, but a mother might die from the shame of it should they be discovered.
I innocently reach for her T-shirt, another post-bath relic. It has Sunday-grab-what-you-can food all over it. She insists as only a preschooler can that the dirty one is the only T-shirt that exists in the universe.
More wrestling. The T-shirt lands with the dirty panties.
Yet nothing has prepared me for the tragedy of the socks. Not those socks, she wails, as I pull out a plain, white pair from the drawer. Those are yucky!
Clutching my last shred of sanity, I pack up the 24 pounds of paraphernalia having two children requires, Sierra's shoes and socks, my 8-month-old son and clomp out to the van. Sierra stands in the doorway, perfecting her screaming technique. When I return for her, she sticks out her arms and whimpers through her tears, "Mommy, hold me." I willingly oblige, then bury my face in her shoulder, joining my tears with hers. After a quick trip to the bathroom to wash her face, I carry her, barefoot, out to the car.
With Sierra conveniently restrained in her booster seat, the shoes and yucky socks go on without incident and we head to Kmart in search of 30 percent-off bathing suits. She wants the bright purple one with neon fish. As she gleefully chatters about showing it to Mamaw, I smile and put it securely in the cart, glad we can put the morning behind us.
Infused with new perspective, I didn't even blink on a cold day several weeks later when she emerged from her nap in a gold shirt and incredibly small yellow shorts, her freshly laundered Lion King panties hanging out, and announced that this is what she would be wearing to the baby sitter's.
I had a fleeting thought that I would need to get my own stupid purple T-shirt. Mine would say, "I'm with her. She dressed herself."
But as Sierra strutted to the door dressed in her current monochromatic obsession, I realized I need to stop caring so much what others think about how she looks. More accurately, what others think of me for allowing her to look how she looks. Children of the advanced age of 3 are becoming their own persons, and Mom shouldn't control every facet of their little lives. Even at 3, they can learn the consequences of their own choices.
It was a sermon I hadn't quite grasped to my bosom, I realized, when we got to Ms. Jerri's and I felt compelled to tell her that Sierra had dressed herself.
I needn't have bothered. Parents who have had Lion King pantie days will already know that.
Burgetta Wheeler is a copy editor with The News & Observer
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