Beautiful Girlhood compiled by Debra Maffett

you get restless and dissatisfied. You think that everyone is crossing you,
when you are really crossing yourself!
Watch the changes in your body. The dress you liked so well last summer —
did not fit you at all when you got it out this spring. You looked almost
comical in it, and you wonder why you ever liked it at all. The dress is just
as it was — but you have changed! You have grown taller and taken on a
new bodily form. Clothes must be cut by a different pattern now to fit you.
You are changing just as fast in your likes and dislikes. Mother has been
planning a special pleasure for you, possibly has begun your new dress. She
explains what she is going to do and how she is going to do it; and when you
have a chance to speak, you break her plans all to pieces. She has not
pleased you at all, though Mother knows very well that what she intended
to do was the very thing you wanted only a short while ago. She looks at you
perplexed, and you are almost angry that she should have supposed you
would have desired such a thing. Perhaps you speak pertly, and Mother
reproves you sharply and calls you an ungrateful girl. You go away and cry
real, hot tears — because you are so misunderstood. You, my dear, have
changed and do not know it. It is not Mother — but the girl who lives in
your body that so misunderstands you!
When I was about fourteen, Mother was making me a new dress, and I
wanted the upper sleeves made very full at the hand and open from the
elbow down. They were very ugly and very unhandy, and always falling into
everything, and it was winter and very cold — but I wanted my sleeves
made that way no matter what was said to me. Mother set her lips together
and said, "Well, you shall have them your way then." Her look called me to
my senses, and I began to back down — but she said, "No, you shall have
them just as you want them," and I had to drag and dribble those sleeves
around until the dress was worn out. I found out that it was just a foolish
notion, which lasted but a short while, that I wanted such sleeves, and that
my real self despised them. Mother knew that all the time.
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