My daughter has grown out of all of her princess dresses.

She’d grown out of them months ago, really, but I hadn’t gotten around to pulling them from her closet to send to her younger cousins, until I finally did so this weekend.

Was it that I hadn’t gotten around to it, or was it that I was putting it off, trying to avoid the inevitable truth that my baby isn’t a baby anymore?

Yes.

When she was two years old, she was obsessed with the Shrek film series. A little unorthodox for that age, perhaps, or at least for these times. She wanted to be Princess Fiona for Halloween, and I was having a terrible time finding a costume for her, but how do you explain to a toddler that the movie she loves so much is from twenty years ago? So, I finally stumbled upon a small shop online that makes frankly phenomenal dress-up clothes. They had (and still have) a dress that’s actually inspired by Merida from the movie Brave, but which I thought looked pretty similar in style to Fiona’s dress too, though it was teal instead of green. It was well made with long sleeves and fabric that would keep her warm since the end of October is almost invariably chilly for us.

My daughter wore what we came to call her Fiona dress for years. In time, I bought many other dresses from the same online shop. She loved getting to choose from them when dressing up to go to synagogue or on other holidays. Other members of the congregation enjoyed sharing their Friday evenings with Fiona, or Snow White, or Elsa, or Aurora. They held up so well and she loved them so much.

When the time came to say goodbye to them, she cried. I almost did too, and I will admit that I said a mental thank you for the memories to the dresses as I packed them up. She asked me to put the dresses in the bag without her there so she didn’t have to watch. I promised her that since I could still order a new Fiona dress in a bigger size for her, I would do so, and it would be okay to therefore say goodbye to her original one.

If I couldn’t get a new one, I absolutely would have kept that dress. We can’t keep every single material thing in our lives forever, but some memories can be too painful to get rid of. As a parent, there are some things we need to be able to treasure and cherish as our babies become…not babies. And since I will only ever have the one baby, this process feels especially hard.

I know that this step of letting go of her princess dresses could be an opportunity to say she’s “too old” for them and she doesn’t need any new princess dresses. I know that. But I don’t believe it to be true in my heart. I mean, maybe it objectively isn’t true; she’s six years old. I want her growing-up to be, well, not slow, but certainly unhurried. I don’t know that I ever really had permission to be a child, burdened by the immense weight of narcissistic and toxic parenting. As a result, my perspective on the appropriate pace of maturity is rather skewed. In the end, I can only try my best to do what I feel is right for my daughter.

Soon I will order her a new Fiona dress, that she will enjoy for a couple more years. When she grows out of this next one, we’ll revisit the question of whether she’s not only grown out of princess dresses but grown beyond them. Given the huge industry of all sorts of cosplay, perhaps it’s something she won’t grow beyond at all. I’d be fine with that too. For now, my mode of operations is that we savor every drop of childhood we get. The days are long, goodness are they long; but, the years are short.

Sidebar: I get no benefit at all from sharing their link, but they do such great work, I’m happy to do so. I highly recommend Little Adventures for any of your dress-up needs, both for children and adults too (on a less broad scale than the kid stuff) if that’s your sort of thing! They don’t just have princess dresses, there’s a great variety to choose from, and the quality has always been great. Check them out, because, as their website says, childhood is an adventure!