THE B WORD

For sale: Ball dress, sky-blue taffeta with a puffy skirt and pretty bow.  Cost a fortune, worn once, going cheap.

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It’s ball season. I’m not the one going but as a parent of teenagers that are, I am feeling slightly giddy. There’s a slow-burn build up that feels like excitement yet it could be panic, these two things have my heart racing the same.

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There’s many a grey area in raising teenagers and a few black and white rules that can’t be danced around.

For parents of teenage girls, one of them is this: You can NOT wear the same ball dress twice. Not even if you cut the pretty bow off, alter the hemline and promise new matching shoes.

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A ball dress, I have discovered, is a product with a use-by date of the worst kind – a perfectly good item that can be worn only once. I think of it as a very expensive disposable nappy – clean it as carefully and as best as you can, still no one will ever want it after you’ve used it.

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It’s bordering on insane to buy a new ball dress when there is a perfectly good one from last year hanging in the closet.

Perfectly good!  I’m aware this makes me sound like a grandmother way before my time. The “save the crusts I can use them in a pudding” kind of nana.

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However, there is a recession on and most of the princesses of Year 12 and 13 are blind to it. Perhaps they simply don’t care.  I’m also guilty of beauty at any price and I’m the one with the mortgage. So how can I blame them?  Well, I don’t.

The cynic in me is easily won over when I see their unbridled enthusiasm and a focus that unnerves me in the weeks leading up to the ball. The effort they put into pursuing the initial dress hunt then the shoes, jewellery, hair and make-up trials is all scary in its intensity.

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My children would be excellence students with top course endorsements if ball prep was an NCEA subject. The ball colours everything else going on at school. “How’s that maths going?” I ask. “Good,” one daughter replies. “Hey, how much is 15 per cent off $360? Cos that’s how much my dress is.”

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Left to their own wild runnings, our two daughters would spend hundreds of dollars on this event. They aren’t and can’t. They work off a budget that took careful negotiation. With only a small amount of sarcasm, my husband notes that this is a good trial to see how each is going to handle future wedding preparations.

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The youngest, 16, is a bargain hunter who also wants the latest colour and style and will go to extraordinary lengths to get it. She will trawl cities and sales to succeed. She will own the whole process with a confidence in her final appearance that’s so inspiring I want to bottle it.

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The eldest,17 and ironically the better saver of the two during the year, explodes her budget with a dress worthy of its own photo shoot. A crisis in confidence blinds her to sales and a creative outlook – she can only buy from the local exclusive ball shop and pays more than I did for my wedding dress (okay, that was 20 years ago and it was a bargain even in those days).

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There’s too much fuss, too little time, too much money and I want to yell “Enough!” To those parents who have gone before me, are yet to get here or choose not to, judge me kindly. 

I tell you we are raising a different generation. One that’s excruciatingly optimistic and full of self-belief. One that demands the best of anything and after being told from all corners of their world that they can have it, they believe they deserve it right now.

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In an effort to be mature and pick my battles, I am flowing with this tide rather than swimming against it.

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As I rue the cost of raising teenage girls, I have to admit to something else. That slow-burn build up is catching. I could lament the sheer wastage on pretty things but I don’t.  Instead of labelling it all unnecessary, I roll with the credit card hits and I bask in the glow of their excitement.

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Yes, I do believe it’s pride in daughters looking gorgeous and on the cusp of womanhood.