On my first day of my freshman year of high school, I showed up in a sequined chevron dress, black flats with large silver buckles on them, and I had a big pink streak in my long blonde hair. I looked like a hot mess, but that's ok. I was fourteen and at that age looking like a mess is pretty much customary. Nowadays girls that same age look older than I do now, and I am five years their senior. It makes me sad for them.
It starts young.
It is bred into most girls that growing up quickly, wearing makeup and damaging your hair with hot tools and bleach, is the only way to live. Until recently, looking like an awkward gawky teenager was just par for the course and was completely acceptable. No, expected.
High school girls did not always look like this.
Showing up on my first day of high school, even the seniors had braces. They were too lanky, and had not grown into proportionate looking people yet. Fast forward just five years and I know girls who are just barely into their high school years who look like models and display very questionable behavior after class is over.
I did not catch this train until the appropriate age.
Truth be told, I am a very natural kind of girl and just bought my first big-girl makeup this year, and the freshmen and sophomores that go to my alma mater look older than I do. I look, act and dress exactly like I am two weeks away from turning nineteen, no younger and no older.
Colleges everywhere are going to have their hands full.
We are raising our girls to skip an entire chapter in their lives which creates some of the best memories with people who love them for who they are, acne and all, and not how hot and mature they look. Colleges are in for an interesting few years when these girls get to school, move out, and have even more of the freedom to act this way.
Slow down, ladies.
The time will come, faster than you think, when you are wishing you were the age you are right now. It is perfectly okay to leave your low-cut-shirt-wearing, full-face-of-makeup, boy-crazy days to your college years and just be a kid for a few more years while you have the chance. Anyway, it seems silly to dress like a grown woman when your mom is still driving you around to your high school functions. Take it easy.
