The Weird Thing I Did When I Found Out I Was Having a Girl
And why it didn't help, PLUS: a 45-second morning beauty routine that gets the job done.
When I found out my second child would be a girl, the first thing I did after crying like, a lot of happy (and hormonal) tears was paint my nails bright red. As the middle child of three girls, I’d grown up in a home filled with all the estrogen and unspoken rules like, thou shall get a mani-pedi before vacation. But after two years as a boy mom navigating a pandemic mostly bare-nailed, I felt like I’d lost my footing in the female department, with my confidence dwindling as a result.
I had my son Shay days after the world went into lockdown in March 2020. As a result, the majority of my early days as a mom were spent in quarantine. Isolated with a new baby and my husband, I transitioned from maternity leave to working from home (aka showing up for many Important Meetings in stretchy pants, baby at feet) and then freelance writing (showing up for no Important Meetings, but still wearing stretchy pants). In part because I had nowhere to go anymore, I retired my work skirts and formerly beloved dresses, which were incompatible with breastfeeding and no longer fit right, anyhow. I gave up on blow-drying my hair (no time) and officially unplugged my hot tools (no patience). With salons closed, professional manicures were no longer an option.
There are lots of reasons new moms forgo this sort of self-care in non-Covid times, like exhaustion, lack of childcare, and apathy, to name a few. Whether Covid or early parenthood or some sort of glaring but undiagnosed postpartum mood disorder was to blame in my case, I’ll never really know.
It wasn’t until I was pregnant again, with a girl no less, that I realized I’d somehow misplaced not just my typical beauty rituals and sense of style, but many more of the pieces that once fit together to make me me. And I didn’t know where to find the shards. Everything in my world had changed so much from my body (big time) to the career that once defined me. Riddled with Covid anxiety on an extended leave of absence from the world, I’d made some great local mom friends, but many of Before Baby relationships had fallen by the wayside, further distancing me from my old life and core me.
With the worst of Covid in the rear view mirror, and a new baby girl on the horizon, I was eager to recover at least a little of what I’d lost before it was too late. Rather than zeroing in on reconnecting with old friends, or considering which parts of the old me I even cared to recover, I fixated on my female fetus and fickle ways to set a “good example” for her…with nail polish, apparently.
Two years into joining the Girl Mom Club, my hormones have simmered down (a bit!) and it’s become clear that raising a little girl is, in many ways, much like raising little boy…except on birthdays when one kid gets mostly trucks and blocks and puzzles, the other gets…so many dolls. (Still?!)
Neither seem to require a mom with red nails let alone a particularly strong sense of self or style or femininity as long as said mom loves them, feeds them, and performs thankless tasks like replacing the rain boots they seem to outgrow overnight before the next storm rolls in.
Watching my kids grow up before my eyes has made time felt very limited and finite. And between working and packing lunches and sorting SO. MANY. FUCKING. SOCKS, this feeling of time slipping through my fingertips isn’t just in my head. Why did I ever spend time painting my nails with regularity? Why do I continue to waste precious moments like, filling in my eyebrows, changing my earrings, or coating the little hairs that grow out of my eyelids the blackest black mascara?! Why would I want to teach my daughter to waste her precious time on such superficial stuff?
All of this said, for irrational reasons unbeknownst to me, I still go through many of the (abbreviated) motions of whatever women’s magazines (ahem) tell us we’re supposed to do. (I’m weak!)
But as the parent of a curious 2-year-old girl and more curious 4.5-year-old boy, I’m very careful to mom-splain all the ways I perform female-leaning self-care rituals in front of them. I sidestep self-depreciation and steer clear of reinforcing what are, quite fundamentally, stupid gender norms. “No one needs to [paint their nails/ face / eyes],” I tell my littles, who are still too short to see themselves in the bathroom mirror, thank god. “It’s just that sometimes makeup makes Mommy feel good and special…even though it’s such a very silly thing to do, right?!” *cue the cutest giggles*
I’m not saying I get it right every time, but one reason why I was so excited to have a daughter in the first place was so that I could try. Maybe just maybe, I could groom a girl who from the get-go, would give zero shits about her pore and pant size and spend her time on…literally anything else?
But then there are Emma’s curls on curls on curls, which feel so soft in my fingers and look so cute when combed (ok, wrestled) into pigtails with the blackest black bows. She hates when I do this, and nevertheless, I persist.
Nothing gives Emma as much joy as wearing a temporary tattoo that she can show to every stranger she encounters—so I know she’ll be trouble when it comes to makeup and other fixings of little girlhood. It makes me wonder whether all this stuff—the constant search for confidence, the desire to look “pretty”—is taught or simply innate.
I thought I’d lost so much of myself in my transition to parenthood that I had nothing left to teach a daughter about femininity and self-esteem. Although I’m still new here, I’m discovering that it’s just the opposite—that finding my footing as a mother has equipped me with more confidence than ever to teach—and learn right alongside her.
On weekdays, I spend my first paid hour of childcare on a workout and shower. But because time is literally money when you’re paying a sitter, I take immense pride in having paired down my ever-dwindling beauty routine to like, 45 seconds, tops, so I can start work asap thereafter. It goes a little like this:
After applying Amazon’s viral TruSkin Vitamin C Serum, my new favorite Trader Joe’s moisturizer, and my forever favorite Trader Joe’s sunscreen, on goes this Neutrogena Clear Coverage Flawless Matte CC Cream with a brush that I use to conceal evidence of exhaustion and acne—proof that I shouldn’t get my products in the grocery store aisle? You decide. Then I dab on this $5(!) e.l.f. Monochromatic Multi Stick Dazzling Peony on my cheeks and lips. My main goal is to look alive, which gets harder and harder after nearly four decades, especially when 4.5 years of them have been sleep-deprived. I finish with a coat of mascara from a tube I probably should have replaced two years ago, which is to say it’s well past its prime and pretty much empty and not at all worth linking here.
When I’m feeling prone to procrastination, I also fill in my eyebrows with this Benefits Goof Proof Brow Pencil, but it’s mostly so as not to seem like a hypocrite after pledging my allegiance to the practice in this Scary Mommy piece I wrote a while back, I Asked A Brow Pro How To Fill In Your Eyebrows Without Totally F*cking It Up.