Whose idea was free dress day anyway?

I have three teenage daughters attending secondary college. How about the person who decided finding something fabulous to wear to impress your peers, when you just grew another five centimeters taller and can't find anything to cover your ankles, comes to my house to help me get through the morning next time?

Women never have anything to wear. At my advanced age I am fully cognizant of this phenomenon and hold it to be quite a real and debilitating dilemma.

As my daughters are female, obviously they also suffer from this joy-sapping affliction.

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Unavoidably, it was panic stations at our place a couple of days before the big event necessitating the purchase of new tops and bottoms and exclamation of the statement, "Seriously, you cannot have grown out of those shoes already?!"

Standing outside a fitting room, weighed down with coats and bags and rejected items of clothing off the sales rack, I overheard myself making a pathetic simpering plea I had no need to voice, "Didn't we just buy new jeans for you?"

Why ask the question when I already know the answer?

Asking this question is a parental right. Yes, I understand we wouldn't be enduring the torture of putting ourselves through this ordeal if the necessary items were happily waiting at home, and I know I am completely at sea in relation to the concept of time these days, it's just that the pain of past purchases always seems like a freshly inflicted wound to me.

When I drag myself back out to the car loaded down with purchases and a bigger credit card debt, my children suddenly feel lighter.

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I wish I could say that on free dress day all the pain paid off and my girls looked incredible, beautiful yes, but to be honest, they just looked like normal teenagers.

That was the whole point of course; it costs a fortune to look current. The majority of teenagers just want to blend in.

May the blissfulness of a fully enforced school uniform reign when school returns.

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