At the playground my 3-year-old daughter, Julia, is busy climbing the rope ladder to the top of the curvy slide. I wrestle with the wood chips that invade my flip-flops and wave to her. Julia returns the gesture, her wave all arm as though she's flagging down a ship. Around me other parents, caregivers, grandparents do the playground dance of half-noticing someone else's child.

"She's so adorable," an older woman says. I smile a thank-you. Another mom helps her toddler on the swings. She studies Julia and then starts with playground chatter. "You're brave." I assume she means letting Julia climb to the top of the rope ladder. "She'll be fine. She's a great climber."

"Not the rope." She points to Julia, who is now running the length of the wooden bridge, her untamed curls bobbing in the fall wind. "I mean -- she's so colorful!"

Up until now I have hardly noticed what Julia is wearing. Upon closer inspection, the tally is this: orange pants that belong to one of her brothers, purple socks, hand-me-down Teva-style sandals, and a light-blue-and-navy striped velour shirt. "She dressed herself," I say and shrug. Julia dresses herself each morning, in fact, in whatever suits her.

The other mom leans in conspiratorially. "He has no interest in dressing himself," she says of her son. "The few times he has, he throws together the weirdest combinations." She says this and then blushes, thinking she might have insulted me. "Not that there's anything wrong with..."

"It's fine," I assure her, and I mean it. Of all the emotional issues of parenting, I am not invested in how my kids look. "Julia's got her own sense of color. Doesn't bother me."

"Well, you're brave," the mom says.

Bravery? Does such a word apply to kid fashion? My own mother would disagree with the word choice, and yet she never would have allowed me out in public in Julia's chosen style.

Case in point: the day before fourth grade at my new, fancy private school. All the girls were invited to Melinda's house to play and to meet me, the only new kid.

"Ready to go?" my mother shouted up the stairs at our new house. We'd moved that summer and I was still getting used to the echoes. Clad in typical end-of-summer attire of shorts and sneakers, I presented myself at the bottom of the stairs.

"Go change," my mother instructed. She looked immaculate, as usual, in a linen top and fitted trousers.

I was shocked. What was wrong with my shorts? "We're just playing outside, Mom. Everyone's going to be wearing this."

She made me change, and I arrived at Melinda's in my seersucker pink-and-white dress with a Peter Pan collar and sandals that buckled on the ankle, only to be greeted by a swarm of dirt-caked girls in torn T-shirts, ragged cutoffs, and sneakers. I was humiliated. Not only did I stand out, I stood out in a voice that wasn't mine, but my mother's. I shot her a look that could wilt cacti.

One of the other mothers stepped in. "Don't you look adorable!" Nods all around.

"Come on, Emily, we're climbing trees!" The girls urged me to join them. I wanted to go but couldn't -- I would ruin the dress my mother had bought me. The problem was solved eventually when Melinda lent me shorts and a shirt, and I sucked up the pain of the blisters that came from running around in the sandals.

This scene was not a one-off. More often than not, appearance played a large part in my relationship with my mother. So much, in fact, that it's hardly there in my relationship with Julia. It's not that I want to exclude how she looks from the equation of how she fits in the world, but rather I want it to take second (or fifth or sixth or twelfth) seat. Granted, she's just 3 years old and my mother and I have survived 35 years of clashing over image, but I'd like to think I won't turn "What are you going to wear?" into an emotionally loaded proposition. I often felt that meeting my mother's expectations was so crucial that there was no way I could succeed.

"You look wonderful," my mother said as I met her for lunch a few years before I had Julia.

"Where did you get those shoes?"

"You don't like them?" I looked down at my feet. I'd splurged on the shoes -- they were wing tips, and later I would come to loathe them, but right then, I wanted her to approve.

"I didn't say that."

"But you did." And she had, with the unspoken nuances that only the mother and daughter can feel and see.

"They're just a bit..." She paused, trying not to hurt my feelings. "...manly." The lunch dissolved into a discussion of feelings versus accessories, my desire to dress and to speak for myself and still gain her blessing over my outfit. It didn't help that she looks elegant in just about anything -- jeans, suits, even culottes (which look good on hardly anyone). Her outfits work, and speak out about the person she is.

At this point, with four kids under age 8, my "wardrobe" is primarily jeans and T-shirts. I'm not one of the mothers who show up at afternoon pickup in full makeup, tweed jacket, skirt, and boots. I'm the mom chucking a baseball in the yard with the same polar fleece I've had since college. By and large I wear what my life dictates.

My mother doesn't mind as much now, but the fear of dressing wrong, of somehow making a fashion faux pas, still lurks in the background not only for me, but for my kids. A few Thanksgivings ago, she and her new husband had the combined modern family (seven kids, sixteen grandchildren) coming over for turkey and football. "Make sure you dress the kids," she said. Hidden in that request was one for me and my husband. "I will," I assured her. I understood the pressure of bringing together people who are suddenly related. "No jeans" was her final dictum. Despite our annoyance (we were thinking nice jeans and a pressed button-down or sweater), we avoided denim, only to be greeted by our entire stepfamily, who were all...wearing jeans.

---