We Call Her the Queen of Central Texas
But are we really ready to parent the state’s flirtiest baby?
On Sundays, R. usually does me a huge solid by not only doing our weekly food shop at the H-E-B, but by taking our now 10-month-old daughter with him. Baby E. is sometimes a bit wily in the car on the way there. Strap her into a shopping cart, though, and that Bean is ready to shine.
Remember how I’ve talked about her affinity for charming people in high-stress situations? Or how she has a natural flirtatiousness that she could have only gotten from her mother? Well, friends, I’m here to tell you that her grocery-store game might just be her best work yet.
The reports from R. are enlightening. For her first few trips, E. was in awe of everything—the colorful produce, the fish counter, the eight billion brightly illustrated boxes of cereal and other grains. These days, however, she is in it for the fans. If someone even lights up a little when she waves at them, she will turn the charisma up to a thousand with smiles and babbling and increasingly manic gestures.
The best part about this is that she’ll also frequently do it while single fisting formula. Imagine looking over at a shopping cart with a little munchkin, only to notice that she is leaning back and tilting her bottle up with one hand…and waving at you with the other. You’d be delighted. And the patrons of Texas’ fifth largest grocery store chain (in terms of sales) are no different.
After his third trip where the Bean spent the majority of the journey yucking it up with randoms, R. gave E. her latest nickname: The Queen of Central Texas. It fits. When we brought her to Fierce Whiskers distillery this weekend—yes, we are those people, and besides, it was my birthday, and also I reject your judgment—E. welcomed several couples to the door, caught the attention of a bartender who just HAD to hold her and forced us into conversations with several strangers who were probably wondering what kind of people bring a baby to a bar. “We’re INTROVERTS, E.,” R. told her after we left.
And this wasn’t even her finest work of the weekend. The evening before, we sat outside at Mi Madres Cantina, and although we were by ourselves for the majority of our time there, a couple eventually sat next to us. After waving them down, E. decided to spin around in her highchair, so that she could lean back like the MOST casual bean in the business and stare them down with her legs propped up (and crossed?) until this couple said more things to her. She then proceeded to pull in another couple from across the patio, our waiter and two bartenders that neither R. nor I even saw for more than 10 seconds on our way into the restaurant.
You get the idea. After a weekend full of forced extroverting (hey, it hits different when it’s not on your terms!), I threw an all-important question R.’s way: Are you ready to parent the Queen of Central Texas? His deeply heavy sigh said it all. He is not prepared.
On some level, this feels fitting. In a recent interview with Kelsey Britt, I talked about how ill-equipped my parents were to deal with my budding sexuality as a young girl. Obviously, E. is too young to be in touch with her sexuality, but we learn a great deal about femininity and masculinity and who we are and how we fit in (or don’t) in small doses from the very moment we enter the world. E. has already learned that smiles, giggles, waves and excitement will often earn you attention. People will tell you that you’re cute or comment on your big blue eyes or fawn over you.
One reason I asked R. if he was prepared to be the father of a flirty girl was because I thought it would be funny for him to think about, but the more serious reason is that I have strong opinions about what is harmful for young girls to experience with respect to their overprotective dads. There’s this societal idea that fathers are supposed to be the guardians of their daughters’ honor—something that often translates into scaring young women into denying their sexual desires, fearing their bodies or feeling shame about the way boys or men react to them, especially if they like the attention.
My biggest annoyance about the rhetoric around being a girl dad is this idea that if he’s not threatening potential suitors to “stay away from” his daughter, then he’s somehow not doing his job. I find this particularly irritating and ignorant when grown men react this way to teenage boys while turning a blind eye to the creepy dudes they hang around with or the family members they dismiss as being “of a different generation.”
If you’re a dad who’s cool with his best friend gawking at teenage waitresses and making lude comments at young women, I think you need to take a hard look at what you’re actually teaching your children. It’s not what you say—as macho as you think it sounds—it’s what you do and allow.
To be clear, I know R. will not be this kind of dad. Partially because he had the misfortune of marrying someone who’s going to be hypervigilant about this bullshit double standard that we foist onto our daughters. But also because he isn’t that kind of guy. I’ve talked about how R. wields his masculinity softly, and I believe that tendency to not aggressively assert his alpha-maleness puts him in the right headspace to take our daughter’s bent toward flirtatiousness in stride.
I can’t tell you what it will be like to parent the Queen of Central Texas. I have no idea what kinds of twisty, challenging situations we will find ourselves in, but I do know that we won’t do it perfectly. We will try our best to get it right. I, especially, will use my own upbringing as an opportunity to do better because I don’t want my daughter to feel the guilt, shame and fear I felt about my own body or how I chose to navigate my teenage horniness. I want her to be more sexually empowered than I ever was. It took me too long to get there. She will get the benefit of understanding the mistakes I made, and she will find her own way through.
Society does enough to make women (and men and probably everyone) feel self-conscious about who they are and what they want. It teaches us to equate a failure to follow an unofficial dress code as a reason why someone deserves some sort of sinister “it.” Various states try to tell us that our bodies are not really our own. I could go on and on. The point is that our beautiful baby Bean needs parents who work overtime to limit the harm. The citizens of Central Texas need a girl (and eventually a grown woman) who stands in her power. Who are we to stop E. from being their queen?
With pleasure,
Yes, Misstrix
Allowing a little girl to shine and empowering her to feel agency over her own body....this is so powerful! We need more of this <3
Love your descriptions of that little queen of yours. And I love how thoughtfully you are, raising this little girl, already protecting her possibilities, her fullness of self. Thanks for another terrific post.