I bought my fifth-grade Tadpole a pair of skinny jeans with holes already in them, a purple flannel shirt, and a pair of black Converse with pink laces.

Damn that felt good.

I remember my own fifth grade year. I felt like an eyesore. I was my own personal parade of bad hair, self-consciousness, and general preteen ickiness. 

In the grand scheme of childhood trauma, I know now that mine is the merest blip on the radar. I didn't then. I had a loving home, enough to eat,  married parents, braces, and piano lessons. 

But this isn't the story of what I had. What I didn't have were clothes. The clothes. Whatever they were. You know the ones.

As an adult, I can understand my parents' tightwaddery. Both grew up dirt poor, one with a single mom, one with a grandmother. We had enough. But enough never included that thing. Whatever it was. That all the girls had.

In sixth grade, the girls wore satin baseball jackets in pink and blue. (I didn't.) They wore waist-length ski jackets and bell-bottom jeans. (I had one pair of sale jeans that I washed every night and wore again. I finally got a short ski jacket from the sale rack at J C Penney in seventh grade, and I wore it until it fell apart.) They wore Nike shoes. This is Oregon, after all. (I wore knockoff shoes from J C Penney). One year, they wore knee-high boots with laces. (Heather had pretty blonde hair and was a veterinarian's daughter. She had boots. I didn't.)

The fashions are stupid, my mother said. They aren't practical. (Of course they're not! That's the point!) My mom was older. My friends' moms had their hearts in the sixties. My mom graduated from high school in 1952, and the sixties were an annoying blip in her mid thirties while she was finally having the family she'd always wanted. My mother, born during the Great Depression, raised during the war years, knew how to stretch a penny until it squeaked, by God, and then she'd make it squeak again. She'd have made the Scots proud. She grew up on victory gardens and backyard chickens and ration books and giving away the saucepans for the war effort, and later on the dregs of Social Security with her eccentric grandmother as they skipped from apartment to apartment to avoid paying rent.

My mom wore double knit pants. She wore a hair net to bed. She wore ugly shoes. While she never bought anything nice for me to wear, she didn't buy anything nice for herself either. It was too expensive. Clothes were a necessity, like chuck steak on sale at Safeway. 

And hair? Hair was cut at home. Once in a while in a salon, with a coupon,  and once at the beauty school. I had a procession of bad cuts, home perms, grown-out this and that, with split ends trimmed by Mom.

Even worse was my collection of clothes that Mom made. Made from patterns I'd picked that never came out like the pictures, made of the fabrics from the bargain bin, they all turned into endless fights that ended in "I made it so you'll wear it!" I was so jealous of my brother. She didn't make boys' clothes. Only mine.

I don't break the bank on Tadpole. We shop at Target and Ross and after-Christmas sales. We get hand-me-downs.

But I get her hair cut in a salon. By someone who is not me.  And I make sure she can pick out some clothes all on her own. Even if they're as stupid as jeans with holes (and sequins in the holes, no less) and black Converse with no arch support. Especially if they're stupid.

She loves them.

I can't make fifth grade any less awkward. But I can let her have clothes she loves. She went off to school this morning in her new skinny, faded, holey jeans, her favorite gray sweatshirt, and her new Converse shoes (with pink laces), grinning all the way to the bus stop.

Yes.