With my daughter, I hesitate to tell her too often how pretty she is. I guess a part of me just doesn’t want her to ever think that’s all she is, or necessarily something she has to be. I mentioned this to my mother, who laughed and said, “you’ll have to tell her she’s smart, too!” This is more in the vein of what I wanted, but didn’t quite fit the bill. Instead, I find myself (a truly guilty, self-critical person) telling her over and over all day that she is a good girl. If a person can just be good, everything else is a bonus.
Anyway, today my older son–who is dead set on becoming a chemist–was telling Fae how pretty she is. Which is fine; it’s not his job to do anything but show affection in his own way, except that he then looked up and said, “Hey! She could grow up and go to beauty school!”
Well, I wasn’t sure how to answer that without a) discouraging him from saying nice things to his sister b) having to make a long speech, the nature of which would have highly annoyed me and c) making it sound like anyone going to beauty school is a bad thing. After about three seconds I finally came up with, “Hey! You could, too!”
I hope I made my point with him without sounding didactic.
At any rate, whenever I think of beauty school I always think of this:
Canny Gal 