“Mom, what does swagger mean? I see it on a bunch of my friend’s Instagram posts,“ Nick asked me the other day.
“If you have swagger, it means you have confidence,” I replied.
“Oh, I get it! Maddie totally has swagger.”
Why yes, yes she does.
*As an aside, I was curious and looked up the actual definition. Which is a slightly more negative way of saying what I said.
Last week, I had my parent/teacher conference with Madeline’s teacher. When she said, “Madeline is very mature…,” I laughed to myself.
Because the night before, she was taking a bath, and I left her for a moment to grab her pajamas and heard her say, “Um, guys, I need help.”
She had been “pretend shaving” and dropped the razor onto the floor.
(The razor still had the plastic cover on it, hence the ‘pretend,’ but was apparently not as out-of-reach as I thought.)
She is forever my four-year-old going on 16. She has never seen me, not once, shave my legs. But knew exactly what to do.
When I was in 8th grade, and still naive to the whole shaving thing, a grade school classmate, Maribeth, who basically spent her days making mine miserable, taunted me about shaving. Or not shaving as the case may be. It was something that my Mom hadn’t yet covered with me, and although I didn’t always ask for permission to do things, I just hadn’t ventured into that territory on my own.
So after school that day, my best friend, Lauren, took me under her wing and I started shaving my legs. And Maribeth had to find another topic to tease me about.
Madeline is light years ahead of me it seems.
Luckily she really *was* just pretending, very clearly going through the motions and protecting her little legs. And the razor has, of course, been relocated.
…
