Too colorful, too loud, too shrill – I constantly receive unsolicited comments about my clothes from friends and strangers. So far that hasn’t bothered me. But now there are two whose criticism I can’t ignore: my daughters.

“Mom, you’re embarrassing,” my oldest says. I want to ignore her comment, but I’m stuck by the way she looks at me. Did she give me a bitch look? This facial expression that is usually attributed to resentful and rowdy women? Their eyes wander down to me. She raises her eyebrow, her lip gloss pout curls. “Just tuck your blouse into the front of your pants? Nobody wears that anymore,” she says. She wears her own shirt open over wide baggy pants.

So there we are, me, 43, and my child, 13, recently part of the Tiktok bubble. She used to like the way I dressed, but now she judges me like the latest fashion judge. “By the way, your mom jeans are also very medieval,” she adds.

Middle Ages? We are in the middle of a generational conflict.

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