Mia Rules

There’s probably a lot not to love about the new Indiana Jones movie. A few unfortunate examples would be the nuclear bomb, the flying refrigerator, and the alien. But what I couldn’t stand about it was Wife. Missing something? Well, I’m happy to fill you in. We’d left the theater hours before and were taking our evening walk in the woods when my daughter suggested that we play Indiana Jones. Being always eager to keep our girl happy and moving, we agreed to play along.

“Let’s see,” she said.

“Dad, you’re Mutt and I am Indiana Jones.” And with that, she was off to traverse an immense canyon (puddle) by swinging from her leather whip (imaginary).

“Wait, though,” said my husband, “who does Mom get to be?”

“Mom is Wife,” said my girl, with an implied “Duh” right there in her tone.

“And what does Wife get to do?” I asked, while attempting to suppress my horror.

“Um, Wife gets to hold the whip when I’m done.”

Oh, like hell she does.

So I was standing in the woods, frantically combing through an entire six years of backstory with my girl. I needed to figure out where I’d gone wrong. I mean, hold the freakin’ whip? WIFE?! How was it that the child of a feminist, of two feminists, had so casually bought into Hollywood’s very-written rule? You know the one: Man equals hero, woman equals plot point. I guessed that there were worse things to be, but I couldn’t think of any. So, I made a feeble attempt to remind my kid that the woman in the movie had a name before realizing that I couldn’t even recall what it was. That’s when I gave up and submitted to the role of whip-toting wench.

Still, this was not unfixable by any means. My husband and I decided that very night that our best bet was to give her a more modern, more woman-friendly dose of high-gloss, celluloid imagery: We would show her Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not the scary vampire parts, but the kickboxing sequences in which Buffy reigned supreme seemed perfectly tailored to our needs. We started watching season one on DVD and immediately loved, loved, loved the way that Buffy ran straight into the proverbial burning building while all of the males waited—knees quivering, I might add—safely outside.

So, without further ado, we picked our clips and showed them to our girl. She went head over heels, right off. For the vampires. God help us all, but at least she was still seeing a young woman kicking evil ass. And I was grateful to think that in a few years, she would be able to view the shows in their entirety—finally, a bona fide heroine in our parental back pocket.

But then something happened: Buffy had sex. And the cinematic earth fell into darkness again.

It’s not that I minded the sex, because I didn’t. It was that poor Buffy could not seem to get herself laid without also getting beaten, bitten, or left. What kind of a miserable life was that? And the message being sent was so, so awful for girls that I couldn’t conceive of myself ever showing this to my daughter. I was afraid that if she saw those episodes, all of Buffy’s super powers would fade into nothing as our girl was made to understand that sex equals punishment: For the first time and every time after. Really, even being the chosen one to stand against the vampires can’t save you? Yikes, tough rule.

Where to look next? We are literary people, certainly, a writer and a lawyer; our house is always flush with books. But we weren’t searching for fine literature here, or even for a female presidential candidate; this search was all about the kid stuff that is pop culture. And our choices verged on the pitiful. We went classic by showing her Madonna videos, but never all the way through—too sexy. She fell vicariously in love with Hannah Montana (we don’t have cable), but it turned out that Miley Cyrus wears one of those archaic “purity” rings—entirely too sexless.

We were starting to feel pretty hopeless when our girl came up with a hobby—complete with built-in heroines—all on her own.

She is worried, though, before we take her to her first practice. “What if I make like a million goals?” she asks. “Would they have to stop the game?” Oh, dear child. And with that, my husband rushes to our computer to find every moving image he can of Mia Hamm and the entire U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, circa 1999. Our daughter watches them all, silently rapt.

Admittedly, Ms. Hamm and all of her impressive teammates are not the freshest of pop-culture references, but neither is Buffy. And remember, Mia and the ladies are literal gold. I know this because, after watching them, my daughter now says that she would like to play soccer in the Olympics. And, even better, when I tell her that she’d need to be among the best in the world, she shrugs at me, becoming nearly four living feet of cocky self-assurance.

It is exactly because of our girl’s charming over-enthusiasm that my husband and I have made a pact. Our agreement is regarding the now iconic image of a sexy, shirtless and screaming Brandi Chastain. She had just won the Women’s World Cup Final, of course, and we feel like one special occasion deserves another. So we’ve promised to do it up right by popping the corn and sipping the sparkling juice. And we’ll just enjoy the look on our kid’s face when she sees this for the very first time: Here’s one girl ruling the brightly-lit world.

Monica Crumback’s essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Brain, Child: The Magazine For Thinking Mothers, Mom Writer’s Literary Magazine,  MotherVerse and  www.hipmama.com. She lives in Michigan with her husband and daughter.

~Monica Crumback