By Esther C. Baird
First published in Tri Town Transcript Mar 15, 2019
I often write about childhood and parenting milestones in this column. For example, I recently came across an old column from 2006 about the time I carried a portable training potty into a bread bakery when they wouldn’t let my then two year old daughter use their employee-only bathroom.
Ah, memories.
But these days I’m more inclined to consider the milestones that I didn’t know would be milestones. The first time my girls were old enough to sit in the front of the car and thought they could control the radio… don’t make me laugh. The first time they walked downstairs wearing mascara and thought I might not notice. You know, the moments that don’t typically get chalkboard instagram announcements.
So today I’d like to consider that enduring rite of passage that didn’t make any Hallmark milestone cards: the first unsupervised trip to the mall.
Our older daughter paved the way. Her first trip a few years back was the stuff of legends. She went to the Burlington Mall with a crisp $20 to spend however she wanted. Her money, her choices.
Half of it, naturally, was spent on food. Did not her mother make her breakfast that day? Was not a nutritious dinner planned upon her successful return? Yes, but… the food court! Its greasy smells and giant fried portions beckoned.
The other half was spent at that tween amusement park, Bath and Body Works. The fabled land of body lotions and creams and masks and butters and gels and candles that are sold in, wait for it, matching scents.
Our daughter hopped in the car proudly showing us what, for only $10, she was able to buy. It was the entire store. “Hand sanitizer, body mist, this smooth creamy lotion, a keychain with a bottle of balm for my backpack…”
She may have kept talking, but I was distracted. “Sweetie, what’s that smell? Did someone spill a bottle of fruit juice on you? Or throw a basket of crushed, but dead, flowers at you?”
I opened the windows and sucked in some air that smelled like… air. “That’s my new cream! It’s Georgia Peach, isn’t it great??”
From that moment on our family would always refer to this as the Georgia Peach Incident. For months her bedroom would occasionally leak fumes down the stairs into the rest of the house where we had to live, and work and try to taste our food without the patina of synthetic peach wafting over us.
Our younger daughter thought it was so funny. Her older sister was such a teenager and spent her money in such crazy ways.
When the Georgia Peach potions ran out (or were accidentally thrown away) we put it behind us.
So last week when our youngest, now herself a tween, asked to go to the mall with her friend, we felt confident. We knew she’d buy excess sugar bombs and fried everything, but she had learned from her sister. She’d merely roll her eyes when the Bath and Body Works scents beckoned to her like artificially flavored Sirens.
But when I went to pick her up, I knew right away things had gone deeply wrong.
“What have you done!?” I asked in a gasp followed by a series of coughs.
She looked at me with glassy eyes wide as saucers and a goofy smile on her face.
“Well, I bought this super cool shirt.” She held up half a shirt that automatically would only ever be pajamas. “And some snacks.”
I nodded, that was clear from the sugar crash I seemed to be witnessing.
“What else did you buy?” I asked, barely able to contain my reaction to obvious answer.
“Oh, well I also bought some hand sanitizers… just the mini ones for my locker or backpack,” she said quickly, as if speed would make it ok.
“In what flavors? Mulch and rotting ocean seaweed?”
She pulled out five bottles, all from Bath and Body Works, all in flavors that leave so exceedingly much to the imagination.
“Close them! Put them back in the bag! Never open them in the house!” I put the windows down and began to breath in the sub-arctic air of Boxford simply to stay conscious.
I thought she had learned! I’d failed this most basic parenting test. But how!?
Our food is now at risk of tasting like suntan lotion that fell into a cotton candy machine for the next few weeks. Forewarned does not always mean forearmed when it comes to parenting milestones. At least when I was carrying toilets into bread stores I could breathe.
Ah, memories.