Fashion: Back To School : The Great Divide : THE MOTHER : ‘I Wish She’d Dress Like Normal Kids’

For as long as there have been mothers and daughters, there have been battles over clothes. Valencia real estate assistant Rose Marie Rockel, 39, says she sometimes goes ballistic over what 15-year-old Jaime wears. Jaime, who will be a junior at Hart High School in Newhall, says her look is a form of self-expression. This is how they see it, as told to free-lance writer Andrea Heiman.

“I think (my daughter’s) clothes are weird. She wears those combat boots with those weird, hippie dresses. Or she wears striped stockings and she looks like Pippi Longstocking. She doesn’t dress . . . the way the other kids dress. Everyone looks at her when she goes out and it’s embarrassing to me. In the mall people turn around and look, and I know they’re . . . talking about my daughter and how weird she looks, and it hurts me.

I like her to be the way she is, but when it’s something really weird I make her change. She has one dress you can see through--she puts black tights and a halter top under it, but it’s still very distasteful. That dress makes me see red when she wears it. We get in big fights because I won’t let her wear it to school.

She dresses the way she does on purpose because she says she doesn’t want to be trendy, so she makes up her own style. I wish she’d dress like normal kids, like the other girls in high school, and that she’d look decent, not trampy. The way she dresses is not like the majority, it’s like a small group. I try to go along with it for a while, then it gets weirder and weirder and I blow up.. . .

She shops at thrift stores like we’re poor or something, and that bothers me. I can take her to a mall and she can get brand-new clothes. Instead, she goes to a store and buys polyester that old people wear, and it drives me nuts. I don’t know if she’s rebelling against me or if she really likes it. If it makes me mad, it makes it worse.. . .

Her thing is: ‘I don’t care what people think of me.’ In a way, that’s good--you shouldn’t live the way other people want you to, but . . . that attitude will get her in trouble when (she’s older and) she looks for work. When she’s been job-hunting she dresses more conservative, so she seems to think that I was right. I don’t want her giving herself a bad image.. . .

I did let her dye her hair red, but it wasn’t a weird red. I was against dyeing it, but as long as it would wash out, I said go ahead. I let her do it for fun. I (hoped) it would make her self-esteem better, and I thought I would try to not be on top of her so much, let her have a little bit of fun.. . .”