June has a new favorite color. Yes, it’s that one. For a year and a half, from the age of two until just a couple weeks ago, she favored yellow and I was quietly, possibly even a bit smugly, proud of her originality. I’d look around at the swarms of little girls in head-to-toe pink at the library or at music class and then I’d look at June, dressed either in her older brother’s hand-me-downs or in the dresses I’d buy her (in blue or purple or green) or in the yellow clothes she picked out. I’d think we were breaking the mold, she and I. We were in this together. No following the crowd for us.

Well, that’s all over now.

We had some warning it was coming. Last spring she started saying pink was her second favorite color, after yellow. When the Bugs class made their paper lanterns for the end of the year celebration, she chose pink paper over yellow. Her teacher Andrea, who knows her way around the preschool set (and has two daughters of her own in elementary school) told us she’d be crossing over to the pink side soon. And she has.

I took it pretty well at first. It’s just a color I told myself, not an ideological worldview. I even have a pink shirt myself, which is something I would have never worn as a kid or really until the past few years. It’s comfy and I wear it a lot. June had almost no pink clothes that fit, so I bought her a pink long-sleeved t-shirt, a pair of pink and orange striped leggings and two pairs of pink socks. I was looking for versatile pieces that could make a lot of outfits without having to invest in a whole new wardrobe.

Even Beth, who was more alarmed than I was at the pink turn of events, melted when June asked her “pwease, Bef” for the pink cardigan with little hearts on it and the pink hooded sweatshirt with the picture of Dora on the front while they were shopping at Value Village (http://www.takoma.com/archives/copy/2008/02/valuevillage.html) during their Columbus Day sale. “I love Dora,” June often says. I’m not sure if she realizes Dora has a television show or not. She may think she just adorns Band Aids, toothbrushes and hoodies.

But of course sometimes pink is an ideological worldview. Along with June’s newfound passion for pink have come a lot of stern pronouncements about what boys do and what girls do. She chastises Beth for having “boy hair.” She says the stuffed animals belong to her and to Noah but the dolls are all hers because “dolls are for girls.” This despite the fact that two of the three dolls she owns used to belong to Noah, and one was a cherished favorite of his when he was a toddler. I know this is normal. She trying to figure out the big, complicated mess of gender and to get her brain around it she needs to simplify it. This is why she has latched on to pink with such ferocity, why she points to every pink toy she sees in a catalogue and says she wants it, why she will point to a girl she doesn’t know in public and declare she is her “favorite girl” just because she happens to be wearing pink. The fanaticism is starting to wear on us and it’s only been a few weeks.

So I have been asking everyone I know with a daughter older than June these questions:

1) Did she go through the pink phase?
2) When did it start?
3) How long did it last?

Feel free to answer them in the comments. I’d love more data. So far, everyone says yes, she did, but there’s a lot of variation in the age question. When June was much younger, someone told me it would be all pink, all the time from the age of two to ten. So I took comfort in the fact that we’d made it well past three and I thought we were home free. But when I ask now, people tell me it started any time between two and four. Ending dates go from not quite five to ten. I’m hoping we can get through it as quickly as possible. Six and a half years seems like a long time to me, although there’s general agreement that the preschool years are the most pink-intensive ones.

Of course, while Beth and I see it as conformity, there is another way to look at it. Beth mentioned June’s new favorite color while talking to her mother on the phone the other day. She had her on speaker so I overheard the conversation. As Beth wondered how this could have happened, YaYa said, “She’s learned to rebel early.” And I think I heard a trace of amusement in her voice. She is going to give us the grief we dress-eschewing tomboys gave our mothers in reverse. The chickens have come home to roost.

After several days of very intense interest in what she was going to wear for the day, June didn’t seem to care this morning, so I got out a pair of jeans that used to be Noah’s, a yellow t-shirt, yellow socks and yellow barrettes. (She does still like yellow. It’s her second favorite, she says.) She accepted the outfit without comment. We went to Spanish Circle Time at the library. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the toddler girl next to her was wearing embroidered jeans, a pink t-shirt and a pink hair ribbon. It wasn’t until we were dancing around to the music that the girl faced me and I could see her shirt said, “Pink is the New Black.”

Around here, it is. It’s just going to take some getting used to.

Note: My dad completed his chemotherapy and radiation treatment earlier this month. According to his doctors, the tumor in his throat seems to be completely gone and his vocal chords are still functional. About that, we are all tickled pink.