For several weeks now the twins have been pleading with me to take them to Top Ten, an accessories store in the mall that they’ve heard about from all their friends. Every few days they come home with reports of who is wearing what – Maya has a new headband, Noga has a new bracelet. I listen patiently, and then I remind them, each time, that I care much more about how their friends are acting than what they are wearing. In Hebrew the word “midah” means both size and attribute – it is used to refer to clothing sizes, but also to a person’s moral characteristics. I am far more interested in conduct than in clothing, but I have learned not to protest too much. Girls will be girls; they like pretty things.

The twins are forever trying to encourage me to dress better and to pay more attention to my appearance. Back when they were in Gan and I used to pick them up every afternoon, they often commented on what I was wearing. “Ima, you’re wearing earrings today, you look so beautiful,” Liav would tell me, reaching out to put her small finger through the metal hoops I once bought at the bus station mall when my bus was late. “Why are you so fancy today?” I gave the same answer every time they complimented me: “I was teaching Torah today, so I wanted to look nice. I wanted to bring honor to the Torah.” After a while the girls understood that if I was wearing earrings, it meant I had taught Torah that day; occasionally, instead of remarking on my earrings, Liav asked me what I had taught, and I decided that wearing earrings was a small price to pay if it meant we would speak about Torah.

These days, though nothing I wear is nice enough. A few weeks ago I was in the park with all the kids on Shabbat afternoon when I spotted one of Tagel’s friends and encouraged her to go over and say hi. Tagel looked hesitant. “What’s wrong?” I asked her. “Shira’s whole family is here,” Tagel told me. “I really don’t want her mother to see you. She’s so fancy, Ima, and you’re dressed so plain.” I couldn’t believe it. Was I embarrassing my daughter with my black skirt and blouse? Had it really come to that?

My girls have learned that it’s useless to persuade me to take interest in fashion, but recently they tried another tactic. I’m reading them Anne of Green Gables, a book that requires a bit of patience on their part because Anne—and author L.M. Montgomery—are enamored of all things beautiful. The novel is filled with descriptive passages about big, rambling orchards, brooks coursing with dark secrets of pool and cascade, wild plum trees in filmy bloom. Anne waxes poetic about the Snow Queen, as she calls the cherry tree outside her window at Green Gables, and she delights in the Lake of Shining Waters, her term for the pond outside her best friend’s house, its water a glory of many-shifting hues. But Anne is not just taken by natural beauty; she also longs to look beautiful herself, as the girls keep pointing out to me.

A few days ago I discovered Tagel on the ipad—or perhaps I should say that I caught her there, since she did not have permission to be on a screen. I was about to reproach her when I noticed that she was scrolling through images of Anne from the various screen adaptations. “Ima, do you think she looks more beautiful here or here?” she asked me repeatedly, calling up different pairs of images until I started to feel like I was taking a vision test and trying to decide, each time, between the two options.

And yet as Tagel reminded me, Anne herself might have done the same. “I love pretty things,” Anne tells Marilla, “I hate to look in the glass and see something that isn’t pretty.” She stops on her walk to church to garland her hat with a wreath of wild roses that she picks by the roadside, to the horror of no-nonsense Marilla, who disapproves of her frivolity. She believes that life is not worth living without a dress with puffed sleeves, which were all the rage among the other girls her age, but Marilla will not abide the wasted fabric. And she dreams that one day her red hair—her lifelong sorrow—will darken to a handsome auburn; when she can’t wait any longer, she tries to dye it herself, with catastrophic results.

My girls tell me that it’s not bad to like pretty things. “Anne would have loved to go to Top Ten,” Tagel tells me. She knows that if she can make a literary allusion, then I am far more likely to concede. “Maybe they’ll have an amethyst brooch,” she ventures with a half smile. Shalvi, as usual, wants to tag along. “Ima, do you think they will have things in my age?” She is confused about “size” and “age,” and gives us trouble about wearing any items of clothing that don’t have a 5 on the tag. “But Ima, it says 6, it’s going to be too big. It’s not for my age yet,” she’ll protest when I hand her a skirt to put on in the morning. It seems she, too, could use a lesson in Middot.

So I do the only thing I can do, and I try to make our trip to Top Ten a lesson in Middot. I tell the girls they can each pick one item in the store, subject to my approval, and then we’ll save it to wear on Shabbat. “Why can’t I wear my headband to school tomorrow?” Liav wants to know, and I remind her of Shammai, who would save everything special he found during the week to enjoy on Shabbat. When the three girls have finally settled on their choices and I’m ready to pay, the vendor notifies me that it’s “buy three, get one free,” and I must choose something else. Alas. I tell the girls they should think of a birthday present for one of their friends, because it’s always nice, when buying something for ourselves, to buy something for someone else too. “I know,” says Liav, “Let’s buy something for Ima!” The girls rummage around excitedly, settling on a sparkly purple nail polish. “We’ll save it for Friday, so we can polish your nails in honor of Shabbat,” Liav assures me, and Tagel, who notices my still-furrowed brow, knows just what to say. “It’s purple,” she tells me, “like the amethyst brooch.”