One of the best things about having a little girl is dressing her. One of the worst things is when that little girl no longer wants to be dressed.

I can do it myself, Shira asserts with the supreme cockiness of a 3-year-old.

Suffice it to say that her fashion sense differs considerably from mom’s.

I like to match. She doesn’t.

I don’t wear leotards to the grocery store. She does.

Some of the girls in her preschool class come to school dressed to kill, in stylish sweater dresses accented with hipster boots and matching hair clips. There’s no way they picked those outfits out themselves.

Personal style is individual, be it coordinating Hanna Andersson separates, preppy Lily Pulitzer ensembles, plaids or stripes. Or, as is sometimes the case with Shira, plaid and stripes.

Often, style is simply about making a statement.

One day last week, she was going for a bohemian look with a pink embroidered T-shirt and a jean skirt that I couldn’t quite place.

At least it matched. I was ecstatic. Then I realized the skirt was on backwards – back pockets on her thighs; cute flower pattern snaking across her tush.

“Shir, you have your skirt on backwards!” I told her.

“That’s okay, Mama,” she soothed me.

“Don’t you want me to help you turn it around the right way?” I persisted.

NO.

I got busy chatting with her big brother as we sat on the front porch steps and waited for his schoolbus to arrive. The bus came. The brother boarded, and I refocused my energies on Shira.

“Are you sure you don’t want to flip your skirt around?” I asked again. I was pleading and I knew it. It was such a cute skirt, after all. Such a shame to hide that flower pattern.

Still, I forced the next sentence out of my mouth: “It’s up to you.”

This time, I made myself drop the subject.

Perhaps fashion is a metaphor for life. If Shira’s bold enough to venture out in public with her clothes on backward, sporting all sorts of unusually eye-catching color combinations, she’s clearly got a mind of her own. Maybe she won’t grace the pages of toddler Vogue but neither will she be a pushover. And that bodes well for her future, even if she never learns that red and pink don’t go together.

Meanwhile, she’s a kept woman, with an overflowing wardrobe of stylish secondhand clothing from two sisters who are good friends, so Shira has yet to really discover that clothes come from stores. Battles over what to buy are doubtless in our future.

For now, she gets only the occasional new item, most often from one grandma or the other.

This summer, my mom bought Shira and baby Orli matching green tank tops, adorned with pink ribbons and a flamingo decal. Shira loves flamingoes and has since she was a toddler, when she dubbed them “mingomoes.” This gift would surely be a hit.

Orli donned hers with nary a protest. Shira ripped hers off and proceeded to cram her body into a purple dress that fit her two years ago. The hem of the dress barely grazed the Thomas the Tank Engine boys’ underwear she’s appropriated from her brother. It would be grounds for an indecent exposure charge were she not so young.

I routinely let her wear her brother’s underwear without saying a word. And I let her carry on with the panty-skimming dress.

A daughter, I'm starting to realize, is not the same thing as a doll. As fun as it is to hand-pick her outfits, it’s not fair. I want her to have her own opinions and make her own choices. I guess that starts with what she wears – or doesn’t.

Still, I’m not above encouraging good taste. So on Friday, when she selected a ruffly lilac top that perfectly coordinated with her treasured hand-me-down butterfly pants, I told her how great she looked.

She smiled back at me then let me in on a secret.

She wasn’t wearing underwear. It’s not that she’d forgotten. It was a conscious choice.

The intentional oversight was part of her newest sartorial rule: Underwear only every other day.

Another mom would have righted the wrong.

The new me? I just laughed and drove her to preschool.

Bonnie appears every Monday on TriangleMom2Mom.