It started with a fleece. A fleece made by a particular company, to be specific. I’ll disguise their identity, because I’m sure their execs are lurking my blog, and I don’t need litigation in my life, so for the duration of this cyber confession, we’ll call them… Southbutt.

So, home rolls my bonus daughter (don’t know the term? look it up here), eager to show me her latest fashion acquisition. She is 11, and in the 6th grade. Out of the bag comes the fleece, black, zipper, familiar Nor… Southbutt logo. And the receipt, which flutters to the floor. “I bought it with my own money, and it was on sale, so I got a really good deal!” She is holding it to herself to show me, clearly thrilled, and I’m a little perplexed, because it is just a black fleece, but I’m trying to be enthusiastic, and supportive of the evolving fashionista.

“That’s nice!” I gush, and it is false even to my ears, forced. She ramps up the hot deal angle, trying to pull me past lukewarm, and then I speak the words that make the shit hit the fan. “How much was it?” She has mentioned it’s star bargain quality so many times now I’m thinking I should check out this sale, pick some up for the little ones.

“It was on sale for $90!”

Well, I heard that wrong. Clearly. “How much?” Calmly, only the slightest emphasis on “how”, but nowhere on earth is there a radar more sensitive than in the girl now looking at me with wary eyes. She repeats that breath-stealing number, and I freak.

It doesn’t matter that it was her own money, fairly earned and hers to spend as she would like. It doesn’t matter that it is essentially none of my business. None of that stops me. I’m looking at a girl who dropped almost a hundred dollars for a fleece jacket, and my stomach is pitching and rolling. I take a nanosecond to gather myself, then launch into a scathing, sarcastic rant on Evil Labels that goes down as one of the low points of my parenting career.

Once again, I’ve revisited my tiresome roll as resident FunKiller. Her whole body droops. She won’t meet my eyes. Mike gets home from work, and I try to suck him into my outrage, but he is having none of it. “Go run,” he advises, and I do. I spend six and half miles trying to figure out what happened there, why I was sweating and nauseous, looking at that fleece in her hands.

Later that night, after all the little minions are in bed, it finally dawns while I am folding laundry.

It didn’t start with a fleece. It started with Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.

I was in the 7th grade. D- T- came to school in a pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, and turned our fashion world on its zitty ear. Those jeans were $50, and in those days it might as well have been a million. NO WAY was my Mom going to get me those jeans. I didn’t even ask, though I wanted them, oh, I did so long for them. It might all have ended there, with a fleeting fashion wish unfulfilled, but it didn’t. Oh, no.

When I was growing up, the class of 1985 at Thornapple Kellogg schools put the “ick” in “clique”.  There was a particular clique of girls whose parents could afford those jeans and bought them for their daughters. There were, of course, also assorted hangers-on to The Clique who could not afford those jeans, but who provided entertainment via vicious behavior toward non-clique members. But that is a story for another day.

I was not part of The Clique. I was not without power and status in my own right (anyone who thinks those terms are strange is repressing memories of junior high), but The Clique HATED me. And I hated them. I hated their deliberate ditziness, and their meanness to the weak among us, and I really, REALLY hated it when they all wore those same jeans, day after day, like some kind of elite uniform of exclusion. And because I wanted them so badly, I grew to hate those jeans most of all. The Clique put a lot of time and creative energy into mocking my clothes. That still stings, all these years later, so much so that THAT was what had me sweating and sick, facing down an 11 year old child clutching the modern day equivalent of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.

The next day, I said my sorries to my girl, for going off on such a rant. And I told her this story, and why it frightens me so to see a young girl so eager to drop half her savings on a fleece just to have that label. I know junior high is all about belonging, and if you watch school release at W-Middle some day, take note of all the little Stepford tweens, dashing to their mommy’s Hummers. It is a label world.

But I don’t have to like it. And, being me, I sure as hell am not going to be quiet about it. I cried a lot of secret tears over the lack of a proper label upon my ass when I was 12, too young to understand that The Clique would not have accepted me anyway, with or without the label.

How many of you know what I am talking about? If you do, and if you have daughters, tell them your story. If they are young yet, read them The Sneeches, by Dr. Suess.

I’m learning to accept that during these years, the urge to blend with the pack is irresistable. In a few years, they’ll all start to emerge from their Southbutt cocoons, and begin to grow into individuality. In the mean time, I simply want to remind my girl to be kind to the ones in the “wrong” cocoons.