Matching Dolls

Last weekend Bill and I were staying in a hotel that was filled with little girls whose faces were caked with makeup, with their hair up in curlers, carrying matching dolls. To be clear: the dolls didn’t match one another; they matched the little girl carrying the doll.

It was creepy because so many of them looked like those pictures of JonBenét Ramsey, the little girl who was murdered back in 1996. As it turned out, there were 25,000 of them (fortunately not all in our hotel) who had gathered for a national cheerleading competition.

We then were surrounded by these little girls and their families at the airport and on the plane. Because of freezing rain, our flight was delayed. One little girl, who appeared to be five or six, was very unhappy and helping to make the rest of us unhappy. I know that people resented what sounded like her selfish wailing, but my hope was that their resentment was focused on the parents who obviously were living vicariously through young children who did not understand fully what was being done to them.

When our daughters were young they asked if they could be cheerleaders. While we didn’t forbid it, or anything else, I simply asked them if they wouldn’t rather be the ones for whom people were cheering. In the end, I was just glad they didn’t push it. I don’t mean to demean those young women who are cheerleaders. They are gifted athletes who work hard. It is dressing very little girls up to look like fully-grown adult women wearing more makeup than a drag queen that freaked me out in the hotel and on the plane.

It is also what society does to girls that bothers me so. My prayer was that my daughters would somehow be protected from feeling they had to be what a man or a society thought they should be to have value. It is the most insidious expression of what culture tries to do to us all, and, frankly, what we often try to do to one another.

Grace is so very rare. What I mean is loving and accepting another person exactly as they are without expecting them to become what you are or what you want them to.

Some of those little girls could walk in heels better than I can in tennis shoes, but I kept wanting to bend over and tell them what a beautiful gift they are to the world, without any of that. I was afraid if I did one of their parents would take me out with the 36 oz. can of hairspray they were following them around with.

by Michael Piazza
Center for Progressive Renewal