Hand Me Downs

2024 7th & 8th Grade Prose Honorable Mention

     1984
     I woke up to see a little white bird fluttering outside my window. My tiny hand gave a
tiny wave as the bird flew away just as the day started to stir, blissfully unaware of what was
happening inside the house.
     The day before was my fifth birthday, and I desperately wanted to wear my new princess
dress to school the next day.
      “Mommy, why not? It’s my birthday,” I whined. It was my favorite gift I had received.
     “No,” she said firmly. “It is not your birthday, and it is a school day; you will wear the
dress I picked out for you.”
      “Mommy! You never let me—
TEN YEARS LATER:
     —wear what I want,” I spit out. “You never understand!” Yesterday was my fifteenth
birthday, and I was given a pair of platform black combat boots and they were all I loved.
     “No, stop, I do understand. I was your age once... times were different back then,” she
told me. She had grown tired of arguing with me about the way I dress. “Those boots... are so
intense! Why would you ever want to wear something like that to school? When I was your
age—”
     I rolled my eyes and scoffed. “Whatever, Mom! Like, nobody cares about what you wore
when you were ‘my age.’ I just want to wear these boots now,” I yelled, throwing my hands
around me as if to enunciate how angry I was feeling.
     As I talked, barely aware of the motions of my hands, a small white bird flitted from one
tree to the next before landing smoothly on my windowsill. I wish I was a bird.
     I snapped back to reality just as she looked at me with a worn-out look on her face from
wearing it so often.
     “Mom, I just want to wear what I—
TWENTY YEARS LATER:
     —want to wear!” my daughter yelled. “It’s called expression.”
     “I understand! I wanted to wear the same things you did when I was your age—I know
how you feel,” I reasoned. The boots she wanted to wear were given to me on my fifteenth
birthday. They were very impractical. I could barely remember wanting to wear them, let alone
why I did so desperately. I looked at my newly fifteen-year-old daughter and wearily sighed. We
were so different in so many ways, but I did understand her in some ways. When I said I knew
how she felt, I did know it—I embodied teenage rebellion when I was her age.
     I gazed out the window for a second. I watched a bird fly from the ground to a nest she
had built in the tree.
     My daughter started to speak again as I sighed a breath of exhaustion.
     “Literally, chill, Mom. Why do you have to—
TEN YEARS LATER:
     —be like this! You’re such a buzzkill,’ you used to say to me,” I told her with a laugh. My
daughter and I were sitting on a couch in my living room, reminiscing about when she was a
teenager. “You really didn’t understand it then, but I did know how you felt, I really did!”
     “Sorry!” she told me, laughing. At that moment, her little daughter bounded into the
room. My daughter smiled and blinked a couple of times. “I know now.”
     “Mama, mama, can I please wear my princess dress to school? Please, please! I love it so—”