Battles and Dragons

Sometimes the answer to the world's problems is a make-up tutorial. Sometimes it's a pet lizard.

I went to the pet store to buy a fish.

This year, F I S H was scrawled in blue magic marker at the top of my seven-year-old son’s Christmas list. Our family has owned a pet fish before, and that one so despised our company that it hurled itself out of the water and through the hole in the top of its aquarium to suffocate on air while the kids were at preschool. Death by suicide on Day One. I came home to desiccated fish remnants, orange fin flakes I had to scrape from the counter while distracting the children with a different kind of Goldfish.

I replaced that one with a prettier betta. When I accidentally killed the second fish myself—by returning it to a freshly cleaned tank before the requisite 3 hours had elapsed—I gave up. No good deed goes unpunished, I mumbled to myself as I sold the tank for $30 on Facebook.

I’m not precious about furless pets. I was casting fishing rods when I was still in diapers, and I can’t muster compliance with a different moral code for a “house fish” just because, instead of hooking it by the jaw, I paid $5.99 to have it gently scooped into a plastic bag. Still, I felt bad about killing that second fish.

Maybe, years later, I was trying to atone. In the pet store, three days before Christmas, I told the eager associate I needed all the things for a fish.

“Oh fun! What kind of fish?” she asked, her body inching toward mine. Her eyes were sparkling, and I hated to pour water on her flame.

But Christmas was days away, and I have four children, and I was hosting 30 people for Christmas Eve dinner. I hadn’t considered what kind of fish I wanted. I told her, “Whatever kind will live.”

Since her enthusiasm for the task of gathering supplies far exceeded mine, I stood off to the side while she stacked boxes on a cart. I’d made a plan to take the fish to my sister’s house, where it would live rent-free until Christmas. While the girl decided which combination of neon plastic plants would best adorn our fish tank, I eyed the reptiles beside me.

I once had a snake in high school. Sort of. My boyfriend bought it for me, and it stayed for a while in my family’s garage. For reasons I can’t remember, it eventually moved to the boyfriend’s house. It occurs to me now that, after he dumped me and broke my heart, the guy was saddled with years of additional pet care. Actually, I Googled it, and likely the snake is still alive. I suppose it serves him right.

I don’t love snakes. I can tolerate them, certainly better than most people. I remember going to church youth group with the ball python draped around my shoulders. I can no longer fathom what that sixteen-year-old girl was about, not on any level. But I guess the easiest explanation is that I wanted attention. (That night, I got plenty of it.)

The point is, I am not too unnerved by scaly things. From the pet store I called my husband, who was driving the kids around town while I ran my secret errand. “Can the kids hear you?”

“Hang on.” He shuffled some things around, maybe pulled over and stepped outside the car.

Even though I knew the kids couldn’t hear, I whispered conspiratorially into the phone. “What about a reptile instead?” Would it maybe be easier? Less gross? Certainly it would be drier. A leopard gecko? A bearded dragon? The bearded dragon was on sale!

My husband considered this. A reptile might require the same maintenance with, perhaps, more reward. I motioned to the store associate to hold off on the fish. “What do those lizards eat?” I asked her, pointing to the reptile tanks.

“You mean the geckos?”

“No the other ones.”

“The beardies?”

“Sure.”

“Beardies eat crickets.”

Mmm. We’d hit a snag. My husband and I considered this—me standing in the middle of a pet store, my husband standing somewhere in a parking lot or on the side of a road. Did the crickets have to be alive? How long did they live? Did we have to buy them every day? Could they be delivered to our house? Was there a pet store on his way home from work?

Four kids shouted from the car; one pet store worker tapped her foot.

I texted my sister. “What if the fish were a lizard and the food flakes were live crickets?!!?!?!??!? Can you still babysit until xmas????”

She texted back, “Even better.”

I replied, “WHY AM I LIKE THIS”

An hour later, my nephews and I were building a reptile habitat in their playroom. In one hand, I held a stick imported from South Africa, meant to serve as decoration. In the other, a plastic bag filled with (more or less) 7 dozen crickets, bought at a deep discount thanks to my excellent rapport developed over several hours with the folks at Pet Supermarket.

The bearded dragon’s name (for now) is Luna. We think she’s a girl, owing to the detection of only one subcutaneous nodule in her business area. She is seven months old.

When the kids found her on Christmas morning, all four of them shrieked. Three in joy, one in terror. (Can’t win ‘em all.)

A corner of our mudroom now looks like a pet store. Along with food and water bowls, we have crickets to keep the bearded dragon alive, and then we have food and water bowls to keep the crickets alive. We have a daytime heat lamp, a nighttime heat lamp, and a UVB lamp. We have orange sand, and a poop scoop, and a commercial-sized jug of hand sanitizer. We have that South African stick.

Now, through no one’s fault but my own, I live in a house with six people, a dog, and a bearded dragon (that replaced the fish and the five chickens killed by a raccoon).

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It took about eight days for me to begin resenting the reptile. When you are in the pet store, you fail to truly imagine the way things will devolve inside that sparkling (but empty) reptile tank. You fail to envision the little lizard turds floating in the water bowl until they dissolve, the dead baby crickets piling up in the corners, the wilted kale and dehydrated cantaloupe the kids threw in days ago.

30 crickets escaped in my sister’s house. My son melted the top of the cricket cage with the heat lamp. I’ve made 4 trips to PetSmart in 10 days. I know that if you buy a dozen live crickets they cost 13 cents each but if you buy three dozen they cost only 11 cents, which is a thing I wish I did not know.

The question I texted my sister in the pet store (WHY AM I LIKE THIS) is real. Why, when most of my waking hours are spent caregiving, would I voluntarily take on another living being? Another being who needs all the food and cleaning of children but lacks all the emotions, attachments, and even the warm blood of mammals?

Why, Lindsey? Whyyyyy the bearded dragon?

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At the top of my eleven-year-old daughter’s Christmas list this year was “skincare.” The hot tween gift this year was a cosmetics refrigerator.

My (three) girls have no access to TikTok, but what happens on that wild internet frontier seeps into the culture of even the most sheltered schools. My daughters don’t have to watch the ten-year-olds with Bubble-brand sponcon deals apply make-up for 90 time-lapsed minutes. They don’t have to know who Kylie Jenner is. They still parrot words like “beauty routine” and explain to me that I can use lots of different colors of foundation to make my face look “sculpted.” (I have lived with this face a long time, and I am 100% sure that no amount or gradation of foundation will make it appear sculpted.)

It's not quite like the Bath & Body Works craze that hit when I was a middle schooler. Yes, I wanted to spray, slather, and soak myself in my signature scent, Cucumber Melon, but aside from some lingering body spray chemicals in my bloodstream, there were no lasting effects. Aside from “you can smell good,” there was no messaging. It was a body spray, not a lifestyle.

These days, the tweens want hyaluronic acid, retinol, niacinamide. They apply eye cream and lip rejuvenator. With religious devotion, they roll chilled rose quartz across their foreheads. They want to feel older by trying to look younger.

Their look becomes their personality: #glassskin, #skinimalism. Their routine becomes their identity.

They are young enough to believe that, with sufficient effort, they might not grow old. Or—they will grow just the right amount of old, and then their glazed-doughnut faces will freeze in time.

Their moms exclaim, “Imagine how good their skin will be when they’re our age!” (They’re wrong about this, but pointing that out helps no one.)

I didn’t want to buy skincare and make-up for my daughters this year. I wanted them, at 9 and 11, to remain outside the rushing river of American womanhood for another year, or two, or three—lest they drown in the toxic, swirling rapids of hyper-consumerism, false advertising, and unrealistic body images.

I told my oldest daughter, Picture the day after Christmas, when your siblings are playing with their toys, and you are staring down a bottle of lotion. She laughed. That does sound kind of lame. She paused, and then with exaggerated tween inflection: But I want it anyway, byyyyyyye! She even kicked up her heel as she scampered off.

I did it. I bought micellar cleansing water and Glossier blush and Sephora lip gloss. I bought a 3-step skincare routine for a child whose skin is literally flawless—for a child whose skin already looks like the AFTER image promised on the back of every beauty package.

The pet purchase was semi-impulsive (in that it wasn’t supposed to have legs). But I can see it now, the way I carried around the burden of those little-girl-lists in my heart for weeks. They said: Buy me beauty, buy me belonging. And then, in the pet store, my little act of resistance. I will buy cleanser for your flawless, self-regulating skin, but I will also give you a bearded dragon. Stay free, my little weirdos!!

I’m not saying it makes sense to forestall your daughters’ entrance into a complicated, lifelong battle with their own faces by buying a reptile that will still be alive when they go to college. I’m saying my subconscious idealism sabatoges my life at every opportunity.

I was fighting something. Premature maturity with childhood impracticality? Polish with poop? Predictability with whimsy? Toxic chemicals with organic matter?

I fought back in other, more conscious ways, too. I bought one daughter a drum set. I bought another sculpting clay and paint.

Make something! I am constantly telling them. Do not believe the narrative that you are the thing to be sculpted and painted.

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For me, this is the vise grip of parenthood: what to reveal, where to give in, where to resist. We titrate information. Because we love them, we dose out danger in little capfuls to our children, like bad medicine swallowed with spoonfuls of better news.

This is the world I wish you lived in, kid.

And this is the one you actually live in.

When my children ask for glitter make-up, I don’t want to explain that microplastics are clogging the oceans. When they hesitate to drink from a straw because they’ve been told they will get wrinkle lines, I don’t want to be the finger-wagging mom who says YOU KNOW KIDS, ANTI-AGING IS A BILLIONS-DOLLAR MYTHOLOGY. I don’t want to point out that many cosmetics are modeled and named after desserts the people who use them refuse to actually eat or sex acts they don’t perform, likely revealing the population’s sublimated desires to indulge. Or how the glosses and shines make us look like AI-generated versions of ourselves. I don’t want to explain that, in the end, they will hate themselves if they have spent their lives hating themselves.

I don’t want to explain that social media distorts reality, that momfluencers are misguided, that algorithms rob us of agency, that our data is being mined, that our creativity is being squashed.

I want to be the fun mom.

I could be the fun mom, if all the beauty ads would disappear. If the wisest people had the biggest platforms. If my daughters’ Christmas lists were shaped by their curiosity instead of by the profit and power of forces they can’t see or even imagine. If, I guess, I lived in a better world.

But I don’t. This world—the world in which ten-year-olds sell other ten-year-olds wrinkle cream—is the world we get.

This is the only world in which I will ever be a mother. So I buy PHA + BHA Pore-tight Toner. For my eleven-year-old.

And every time I walk past that $28 bottle of toner, I remember being ten and wishing I were fifteen. I remember playing with my mother’s make-up and my aunt’s high heels. I remember having fun in that childhood space when blue eyeshadow had zero significance and “the male gaze” was just something a nerd might say in a sitcom.

There is time, later, for her to sort these things out.

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But!

I also buy the bearded dragon.

And every time I walk past that $200 investment and get a big whiff of comingled cricket excretions, artificial gel hydration pellets, and rotting cantaloupe, I keep myself from screaming by remembering that this is what I wanted: for my kids to play with real things.

For my kids’ friends to want to come over, even though our house is full of books and paintbrushes instead of iPads.

For my house to feel very alive.

I was drawn to the bearded dragon because it is a thing with no narrative. No agenda. No meaning whatsoever.

The lizard is not an influencer. She eats and poops and sits on a rock. She’s messy because she’s alive.

Sometimes, we need a break from being shaped.

Who needs skincare when you have this kind of entertainment?!

Most of parenting is deciding between these two things: the world we have, and the world we wish we had. I know processed foods are bad for my kids. But just because I know something is “bad” for them doesn’t mean I won’t let them have it. Knowing what I know about processed foods, I still have a choice to make. I can insist that my kids snack only on celery, or I can let them grab Ritz crackers on their way out the door.

It seems so simple before you have kids, when it’s all abstract. Just don’t give your kids junk, lady. But I have factors to weigh. Limitations to consider. How tired are they? How tired am I? Do I want to die on the hill of celery? Or do I let this slide so we have energy for a bigger battle?

What is the bigger battle? What is the biggest battle?

What’s the hill I’ll die on?

Even if I wanted to push back against all of it, I couldn’t.

Not if I want to have any fun.

Most of life is deciding between these two things: the world we have, and the world we wish we had.

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Two days ago, I took my daughter and her tween friend to Sephora. As one of her Christmas gifts, I’d made an appointment for a make-up lesson at that little beauty bar lit up in the middle of the store. When we walked in, it was marked with a sign that said RESERVED. The girls giggled. For us?

They giggled again while a 50-year-old woman showed them how to blend eye shadow colors. They listened intently as she explained neutral and warm undertones. They squealed when they saw themselves in the mirror, wearing eyeliner for the first time.

Watching, I wondered if they were growing up too fast, if they were being sold a false bill of goods, if they were cataloging distorted representations of reality.

But I squealed, “You look twenty!” I squeezed my daughter’s shoulders and told her she was goooorgeous. “Little supermodels!!”

After, we walked to Starbucks and I bought them pink drinks. Yeah, I thought about the 25 grams of sugar and wondered about the cup’s compostability and questioned if I was modeling responsible spending habits.

But they didn’t need to know that—not yet, or not today.

If skincare was her gift, then it needed to feel like a gift. Who cares if you got the trendiest blush in town if, when you unwrapped it, you caught a glimpse of the gift-giver rolling her eyes?

Sometimes the gift to my children is permission to play. Sometimes the gift is silence. Sometimes the gift is Fenty brand lip gloss. And joy. And pink drinks!

The Christmas gift spreadsheet I keep on my laptop is a list of tensions. I buy something to challenge one child, something to relax another. Something to work hard on, something to veg out with. I balance meaning the way other people balance numbers.

But that’s nothing new. Every mother holds infinite tensions inside herself (beginning with: I wouldn’t trade you for anything / What happened to my life).

Back at home, my oldest daughter lines her bathroom counter with new products. She doesn’t care about using them as much as knowing what they are, how to speak the language of beauty culture. Of today’s version of girlhood.

She is the child who ran from the room in horror when the bearded dragon was discovered on Christmas morning. A few days later, I make her come with me to dig old paint out of the basement. We paint four different colors on the walls where we’re keeping the bearded dragon: pink, turquoise, mauve, chartreuse. The alcove doesn’t smell any better, but it’s cuter.

Gecko glow-up!

Eventually the other kids make her hold the lizard. She pretends to be afraid. Then, her eyes grow huge as an idea dawns on her.

“Oh my gosh Mom. Can I paint her fingernails?!”

I shake my head in mock exasperation, smiling. “Yeah, kid. Knock yourself out.”

Ten minutes later, she beams as she lifts the dragon’s delicate digits. “So cute, right?”

“Wow. I love it so much.”

And I'm mostly telling the truth. Do I want to wipe lizard-pee slime from fake rocks after the kids are in bed tonight? No. But for now, a stinky bearded dragon with a high-end manicure is as good a metaphor as I have to offer these daughters of mine.

Yassss! (They’re purple.)