Halloween Finery

Last week I took my daughter to the Halloween parade at her daycare. It's one of those iconic traditions, like the first day of school or the first loose tooth. Just like when I was a kid, all the kids marched around the playground in their costumes, occasionally peeling off to grab their parents from the sidelines or chasing each other across the hopscotch markings. There was much carousing and fun.

Oddly, I didn't notice a single homemade costume. Some of them were dimestore-type Superman capes and plastic masks, while others were beautifully stitched Renaissance tunics with velvet boots, but they were all new looking and from a store. When I was a kid, I made my own costume every year. In fact, I had been thinking about sending my daughter in a cat costume. I made the ears using a black headband and pipecleaner wires, with black tights stretched over them. In the end, she went as a dragon instead, because I happened to have an old purple dragon costume someone had given us.

2) In my daughter's class of 15 kids, every other little girl was a princess. They were all wearing really pretty costumes, too - sparkly tops, tulle skirts, tiaras, magic wands, sashes. A couple of them had glittery fairy wings too. I watched her marching around rather grimly in her potbellied dragon suit - and then I saw the other little girls skipping and laughing together in their beautiful costumes, tossing their hair - and I felt such a pang for her.

She's only 3, but already I worry that she's going to be sidelined, ignored, or bullied by the popular girls in the years to come. There are a million reasons they might find for ostracizing her. She doesn't talk enough. She doesn't have "pretty" hair. All her clothes are hand-me-downs or from the thrift store. A fair number of them are actually things that I or my husband wore when we were little. She doesn't watch TV, so she doesn't have that pop culture connection. I keep the radio tuned to classical, so she doesn't know about Hannah Montana or popular music. She doesn't have a Barbie.

Most of the time I send her off to school wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, sometimes overalls, and sneakers. The sweatshirt is often something that a boy might wear. It seems like a practical, simple outfit, exactly what I would pick for myself. When I see the other girls at her daycare, though (on a regular day, not Halloween), that's not what they're wearing. They're all dressed in little skirts with tights, sparkly ballet-flat shoes, and Gap shirts. They all seem to have long hair that their mothers put up in bows or ponytails that cascade over their shoulders. My daughter's hair is a basic bowl cut, too short to put up.

I thought I had a few years before I needed to worry about her peer group, but perhaps at age 3 they're already noticing that she's different. I don't know how to equip her to deal with it. My own strategy was basically retreating into my own mental world, which was dominated with ancient Celtic mythology (Rosemary Sutcliff novels), horses, and fantasies where I had telekinesis. Whenever anything bad was happening to me, I just shrank away inside so it was almost like it was happening to someone else. Bullies eventually gave up on me because there was so little reaction. And the popular kids didn't notice me. That's not what I want for her, though. I want her to be happy in her own identity, and to choose her own friends - not just be stuck with whoever she can get.