To protect my youngest daughter's privacy the best I can in a public column, I'm not going to mention what school she attends, but honey, this column is for you.
So last week, I am told there is a dance at a Santa Rosa County elementary school and she is soooo excited! "Mom! There's a dance next Friday and (a boy) asked me to go with him!"
I processed this information driving home from her school. I ran through several points in my mind —including her age and the fact that my six-year-old grandson is in the back of the vehicle shouting, "I'm going too!"
My daughter turns to me, frustration all over her face.
"He can't go Mom! He'll ruin it."
I frowned. I had no frame of reference about this dance and whether a first-grader would be going to the same event a fourth-grader would attend.
"When is this dance?" Next Friday.
"Are you supposed to get dressed up?" I needed to know this, seeing dollar signs flash before my eyes.
"I need a dress," she tells me. "I can wear my Easter dress!"
"No." I tell her. "You need a new one."
"I'm going too!" Bradley hollers from the back seat.
"No you're not!" she tells him.
I whisper, "hush" to her, telling her to stop arguing over something that we can't control. I tell my grandson, "That's up to your dad."
My daughter says to me in a sharp whisper, "He's not." I frown at her and keep on driving.
Two or three days pass and I promise to take her dress shopping, which we did last Saturday. We found a formal dress, very grownup…maybe too fancy for this dance, but I was standing next to her in the dressing room when she turned around to see herself wearing this dress in the mirror. She smiled a huge smile and said, "This is the one."
Moms know what it means when we hear those words. We are done shopping; pull out the credit card— we get to go home!
She was so grown-up it melted my heart to see the excitement in her face.
She tells me her date is renting a tux. A little fourth-grade tux! So so cute.
While we were still at the dress shop, she begins talking about, "That flower thing that you wear on your wrist." We tell her, a corsage. She says, "Yeah! (The boy) is getting me one of those, so I told him I'd get him a bag of Skittles."
The owner of the dress shop, my friend who took us shopping, and myself… we could not contain ourselves. We roared with laughter and she laughed too and then said, "What?" We started laughing again. I asked her, "Why skittles?" And she said since he was getting her something, she asked him what she could get him. He said he liked candy. So that was that.
The dance is tomorrow so we stopped by the store this afternoon and she picked out some Skittles and Hershey's kisses. I explained to her what a boutonnière is and asked her if she thought he might want one of those too. She said yes so that's what I'll be doing tomorrow.
Bradley is not going.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Woman on the Edge: The Dance