kids

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Weigh-In Wednesday: Mean Kids IRL

Are you walking with Elisabeth today? I haven’t gotten my walk in yet, but I have one planned for this morning with my dear friend K. 

Carla and I got outside after dinner last night for a quick walk around our neighborhood. The topic? Mean kids. 

Oh, how grateful I am that I am not in middle school any more. I would not go back to middle school for anything, that’s for sure. Or high school. It’s a miracle that any of us survives. 

My memory of middle school is that I was neither popular enough to be “in” with the popular crowd nor enough of an outcast to be a target. But oh how I remember the popular crowd. Supposedly, there are two kinds of popularity: popularity through status and popularity through likability. While I can think of someone in high school who was most definitely the latter, the middle school ruling class seemed to operate through some complicated algorithm of beauty, power, and skill (at sports or academics or arts) that I’ve never quite been able to understand. 

A few people seemed to always remain at the top of the popularity pyramid. They were the ones who had the ability to demote people from inner circle to outcast, or to promote people from unknown to one of the in-crowd. It seemed so capricious, the way people shifted positions. And the thing I didn’t understand then – and am no better at understanding as an adult – is how people could be nakedly mean to others, but if they were popular, other kids simply followed their lead. 

One of my friends has a kid who has been bullied, on and off, for several years. It breaks my heart just to hear about it; of course it must be a thousand times worse for my friend, and even more awful for her kid. Our school has a very clear No Bullying policy, with a structured response system… maybe it makes an immediate difference in how kids treat each other, but it doesn’t seem to deter repeated bullying in the long term. 

Bullying is, of course, its own horrific animal. But there’s also just run-of-the-mill mean. Saying you can’t sit next to them at lunch. Ignoring you in the hall. Whispering with another friend in front of you. Consistently rejecting your ideas. Deriding your appearance or behavior or belongings. Being mean to you in private but pleasant to you in person, so complaining makes you delusional or over-sensitive. And this is all in-person stuff. The sky is the limit for how nasty kids can be via digital means!

My memory is terrible – which is a blessing when it comes to some things. I can’t remember specific incidents in middle school. But I do remember the mean girls. How you could so easily fall from grace, for no greater blunder than wearing the wrong color shirt.

I could be misremembering, but it seems like my parents’ catch-all advice was “ignore them and they’ll go away.” Which is decent advice, as far as advice goes… and is also nearly impossible to do when you’re in middle school. 

How DO you deal with mean kids in middle school???? 

Carla and I watched a bunch of YouTube videos together, purporting to offer techniques. We discussed the possible sources of meanness, and talked through a bunch of potential ways she could react to the current mean girl. Unfortunately, all the things I could come up with weren’t workable for some reason or other. Which I get. When you’re in middle school, things like friend groups and who sits where and what you can say to one another feel very rigid. For instance, one of Carla’s great strengths is that she is friendly with pretty much everyone, so I suggested she simply sit at a different table with another friend. But it sounds like there’s no precedent for moving among different friend groups, especially at lunch time. 

How do you deal with mean people as an adult? 

Fortunately, I haven’t had a lot of experience with mean people as an adult. And, even more fortunately, it is MUCH easier to avoid mean people as an adult. (It’s trickier when the mean person in question is a colleague, and the only tactics I’ve used in those cases are a) scrupulous professionalism and b) finding a new job.) On rare occasions, I’ve been able to call someone out (in an admittedly timid, conflict-averse way), saying something like, “Wow, that sounded pretty harsh.” Or “That hurt my feelings.” Or, in the case of comments about other people, “That person is my friend, so I’d prefer not to discuss her when she’s not here.” My best strategy is to be briskly friendly when I encounter the mean person, but to limit my interactions with them to the absolute minimum. 

Years ago, there was a person in my circle who had some mean girl qualities. The main one was gossiping about people behind their backs. (Which, of course, made me highly reluctant to share anything with her about myself.) One day, she made a completely thoughtless comment about my friend who died. I was shocked, but in the moment, I was able to push back gently, saying something like, “Yikes. That probably didn’t come out the way you intended it!” only to have her double down. That was when I began disentangling myself from her for good.

But of course, when you’re in middle school, it’s nearly impossible to extricate yourself from a relationship with a mean kid! They are always there! In your classes, in the hallway, in the lunchroom, on the playground! In many cases, they are in your friend group – and why should you have to jettison your entire friend group because one person is a jerk? Middle school power dynamics make it difficult to oust someone from the top of the popularity pyramid… and, even if you manage to do it, where does that leave you? With a shiny new Mean Girl label on your chest?

It stinks so much when my kid is struggling and my only advice is “ignore it and it will go away.” Or “there will be a time after this.” Those things are so much harder to implement when you are twelve than when you are forty-three. There are lots of recommendations to have empathy for the mean kid, who must surely be mean because they feel bad about themselves or have something bad going on in their own lives. Empathy is important, don’t get me wrong. Carla and I have talked a ton about what might be driving mean behavior and how we should feel more pity than anger toward someone who’s mean. But empathy doesn’t fix the meanness.

Are there any books that offer real, usable advice? We already own several from the American Girl “Wellbeing” series, and I think I’m going to order this one as well. Now I’m worried that Carla might be too old for American Girl books. Perhaps I should also get her this one. And this one, too. (I always turn to books for advice, which makes me feel kind of like a dinosaur. But I can’t stop. And I do sometimes find Carla reading through the advice books I’ve gotten her, so I know she is aware of them and has turned to them in times of need.)

Is there any advice for parents whose kids are dealing with mean kids??? When my friend told me about her kid being bullied, all I could do was listen. I had no advice. She’s doing All The Things she can do besides switching schools; the bullying still happens. She’s read all the same stuff I have, about how the most important thing for kids being bullied is that they have a secure home life to turn to for support. She knows as well as I do that kids grow and change, popularity shifts. That her kid will eventually find Their People. That sometimes the only way out is through. 

But oh, how impossibly hard that is. Especially when it’s your child’s soul that’s suffering. 

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Five for Friday: These Exquisite Endless Fleeting Days Edition

Last night was one of those nights: I woke up at two, could not fall back to sleep, and as I drew closer and closer to morning, my brain decided to amp up the anxiety. It went like this: Dinner party stress: I think I will do a Greek salad; I do want to grill the salmon/chicken beforehand, but that means I need to clean the grill today. Probably I should also make hummus today, too, so I can use tomorrow before our guests arrive to panic-clean everything in sight. Birthday party stress: the treasure hunt is still in progress, and I don’t yet know if we’ll have enough kids for teams which affects how I do the treasure hunt. I need to text a neighbor about using his mailbox as a clue location. And oh, since the resolution of the treasure hunt is going to be the big pink flamingo pool floatie, HOW am I going to do that if the kids swim before they treasure hunt? Maybe the kids should do the treasure hunt first, then dinner, then swim? But that means swimming later, and will we bother our neighbors? Upcoming travel stress: Ugh, I do not want to get on an airplane. Will the cat sitter be as good and trustworthy as my friend said she would be? Will the cat be too lonely? My husband will be here with him at night, but he is so used to people. Will he hate me and Carla when we return? Will my husband be lonely? I’ve never left HIM alone this long before, either. Social stress: I have one upcoming week during which I am Carla-free, and I’ve so far planned FOUR meetups with friends, and I want to do all of them, and at least three of them won’t happen this summer otherwise, and yet ACK. Upcoming sleepaway camp stress: Ugh. What will I do without my baby while she’s away? Will she be okay? What if she hates it? What if she gets poison ivy and can’t sleep and is as miserable as she was the first time she got poison ivy, and was more wretched and despondent than I’ve ever seen her? And of course the recent Texas tragedy is playing over and over in my head, God rest the souls of those poor children and soothe the hearts of their parents. What if… Not floods, probably, but fires or bears. How do I teach Carla to evade a bear without terrifying her? IS there a way to evade a bear? She’s so little. Does the summer camp have A Bear Plan? Should I call and ask or will they think I’m crazy? Apocalypse stress: All this flooding feels Biblical in nature. And the wars. And the news. Everything is hopeless. 

That was when I got OUT of bed, because being in bed was no longer going to lead to sleeping. I checked on my child, flopped across the entirety of her bed like a starfish, and stole the cat (also sleeping, also taking up as much bed as possible) (what? there’s no rule against waking sleeping cats), and went and sat in my office trying to hypnotize myself into sleeping via the motorcycle rev of the cat’s purr. 

The cat purred until he fell asleep, slept, and then – as usual – abruptly woke up and decided it was time to play. So I got out my laptop and wrote this post. 

I have been feeling guilty ALL summer about how constricted I feel with Carla around so much. Especially guilty now, as her sleepaway camp nears, and I won’t get to see her at all. I know in my heart that it’s not HER that I’m resisting; it’s the dearth of time alone, that’s all. Spending time with her is, in fact, so precious. Here are five of things I’m loving about our time together. 

  1. Mornings with Girl and Cat: Every morning, I either wake up and feed the cat and then take him up to Carla’s room, where he wakes her up with his purring. Or Carla wakes up first, feeds the cat, and I wake up on my own. Either way, we end up watching cat videos on Instagram for an unplanned amount of time. I hold the phone, she nestles into me, the cat lies somewhere between us, engine rumbling. It’s more comfortable so snuggle up in her bed – there’s more space. But I kind of love the mornings when the three of us gather in the armchair in my office. There’s nowhere near enough room for both of our rear ends in the chair, but Carla squishes herself in, half on top of me, anyway. We have so rarely had morning plans this summer that we take our time. Mostly I try to keep our reel-scrolling to ten or fifteen minutes, but one day we watched for a half hour. We’re in our pajamas. She leans her head against me. Her hair tickles my cheek. Her legs, coltish and long all of a sudden, overlap my own, her feet almost reaching mine.
  2. Car Rides: Now that I’m not driving two hours a day, every day, I’m no longer averse to going places. Carla gets to sit in the front seat now and she loves it. I am surprised by how much I love it, too. She chooses the music we listen to, she makes jokes, I can reach over and squeeze her knee. There’s this very subtle shift that’s happening – I suppose it’s been happening all along, and I only just noticed it – wherein she’s becoming less of a charge I am shuttling about and more of a companion; I’m not ferrying her places, we’re going on adventures together.
  3. Cat Obsession: I am almost embarrassed by how much time the two of us spend observing the cat. He is just so cute, Internet. And Carla and I fully and intensely agree that everything he does is cute, and we want to be informed of everything he is doing so we can take part in the cuteness. The two of us will stand on either side of the cat tower and pet him and comb him and rub his little feet (he loves to have his back feet rubbed and will splay his little toe beans so you can gently rub the webbing between his toes) and admire him and tell him how handsome he is. If he is doing something adorable (most recently he jumped onto my bathroom counter and “hid” in the sink), one of us will call out to the other so we can both bear witness. No one else in the world is as interested in his every whisker twitch as she and I are, not even my husband, and I love that we have this shared obsession. 
  4. Pool Time: Carla seems to have much more fun in the pool when she has a friend over, and I get that. Unless you are a boring adult and enjoy swimming laps, it’s a little lonely to play in the water by yourself. But friends cannot come over every day, and sometimes we just have each other. We play a game we came up with last summer, Water Spa, where one of us is the client and the other is the incompetent spa technician. The client lies down on the pool float and the technician drags her around the pool trying as hard as possible to dislodge her from the float. We practice handstands and Carla gives me tips about how to do mine better. We wave to the kitty, who watches us from the window. I don’t know that I’ve played with Carla all that often since she was a little kid. I was never great at it; I don’t enjoy it. But I’m learning to relish these playful hours in the pool, just the two of us. 
  5. Unexpected Undertakings: During the school year, our time together is fairly structured. Wake ups, breakfast, me cajoling Carla through getting dressed/brushed/out the door, car rides to and from school, me prodding Carla through her weeknight activities or homework, dinnertime, bedtime routine. This summer, with so much free time, we’ve ended up doing things I’d never anticipated. Playing Clue together, then watching the original Clue movie. Watching YouTube videos about how to give a cat a “hygiene cut” and then giving our cat a hygiene cut. Taking videos of the kitten and editing them together for his non-existent Instagram account. The other day, I was working on her treasure hunt and she wandered into my office and perched on the arm of the chair, curious about what I was doing. I didn’t give her a peek at the treasure hunt – she will not get an unfair advantage! – but I did show her my digital folder of birthday things. I’d created a Pool Party Scattergories last summer, in case we had rain and the pool wasn’t part of the party, and she was delighted. We played it together, just the two of us, sitting there on my chair, counting down “Three, two, one” and then saying our answers simultaneously. When the prompt was “things you find the fridge” and the letter was E, we both said “eggplant” at the exact same time and dissolved into giggles. Mundane things made magical.

This summer has reminded me of that feeling so familiar in Carla’s baby and toddler years, of being touched out and overstimulated and unable to have a moment to myself. It has reminded me of that first summer of Covid, when I was Carla’s sole friend, teacher, parent, and entertainment and I was ill-equipped for any of those roles and I felt like it was unfair that she was forced to have me as her mother when she deserved so much better. 

It has also reminded me of how joyful and creative Carla is: She is so full of laughter and singing and buoyant ebullient energy. She and a friend composed a song about potato chips, of all things, and it’s catchy and hilarious. She wrote a story (about the cat) for submission to Story Pirates. She created an absurd exercise routine she does in the pool, narrating herself spoof-gymfluencer style. She constructs elaborate lairs for the kitten out of boxes. She is a delight, still in many ways a little girl while in increasingly numerous ways a young woman, and I have a front row seat to the complexities and contradictions of this stage.

Right now, she wants to be with me. Yesterday, after we’d been looking up Truth or Dare questions for her sleepover (I’m writing them on slips of paper and putting them in a basket), and I needed to go do something, she called after me, “And then when you’re done, we’ll do something together!” As though we hadn’t been doing something together all day long. 

How long will this last? It won’t last forever; it can’t. The point is not to hold her tightly to me, it’s to stay here as she leaves.  

I never learn; I seem destined to repeat this lesson again and again. There is exasperation but there is also an urgency to preserve these moments in amber. The push and pull of parenthood, the resistance to and longing for closeness, the need for separation and the anguish that separation leaves behind.

* * *

We go around the neighborhood together, me on foot, she in her new rollerblades. She’s still a little unsteady, so she holds my hand. It is so hot, as hot as the summer she was born, when I walked endlessly around the block trying to induce labor; sweat trickles down my back, her hand is damp in mine. When the road gets steep, I pull her, even as an ache spreads across my shoulders; on the downhill side, she grips tight to my waist, her arms hot, her weight setting me off balance. 

There are places where the road is flat and smooth, where she lets go and glides ahead of me. So far, there’s always been another tricky spot that causes her to stop, wait for me to catch up, thread her fingers through mine. Any day now, she’ll discover she’s fine on her own. I hope she always reaches for my hand. At the same time, I hope she doesn’t look back. 

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Five for Friday

It IS Friday, right? I am at the point in summer where I have sort of lost track of the days. I have certainly lost track of the ability to write a cohesive blog post on one topic, that’s for sure. (Did I ever really possess that ability????) So let’s do some bullet points. 

1. Sleep Regression: I have become a baby, internet, mixing up my days and my nights. I have trouble sleeping at night, so I end up napping during the day. Which makes me not sleepy at bedtime, so I stay up later than I intend to. Then I am tired the next day, so I take a nap. Lather, rinse, repeat. I am not a fan, and also I’m not really sure how to correct this??? When I try to not nap, I end up nearly falling asleep while driving, so I don’t think that’s the answer. Probably the answer is some combination of better habits and seek professional help, but I don’t feel like doing those things so I’m whining about it instead.

2. Velcro Baby: Speaking of babies, my actual baby (who is a long-limbed pre-teen) stayed home from camp this week to fight a cold. It’s one of those awful coughs, and the doctor basically said there’s nothing they can do about it at this point. Hopefully it goes away soon, I hate hearing my poor kiddo hack away in the middle of the night. It’s been a while since she’s had a sick day, and she was Velcroed to me the entire time, which I think is as good a demonstration as any that she is sick. We watched MANY movies. Having her draped all over me was both lovely – I mean, how much longer is she going to deign to sit on my lap? – and tiresome. She is heavy, now, and has many more elbows and knees than seems possible, and they are all sharp. I kept telling myself to enjoy it; I would have my body and my time back soon enough, and being able to snuggle with her is precious and limited. And yet I just wanted some personal space for the love. I am so used to her being so independent, it’s a little startling how little patience I have for dependency. It reminds me of the toddler years, and how HARD it was, to have someone touching me at all times, to have someone needing me at every second. Big kids bring along their own challenges, but mine at least has not been as physically demanding as she was a few years ago. If you are in the toddler stage, you have my sincere empathy. By the way, having an 11-year-old cough in your face is just as charming as having a three-year-old cough in your face. Some things never change. 

3. Mosquito Prevention: My legs are covered in mosquito bites right now. COVERED. I have a hideous bite on the back of my arm, too – red and angry. It’s unattractive and itchy. I haven’t had bug bites like these since the beginning of the summer. You know why? Because my husband bought this mosquito repellent device and we turn it on anytime we are outside. IT IS MAGIC. We’ve had it outside with us basically all summer, including during our two recent dinner parties and I came away with nary a bite! But then we went to our neighbors’ house for an impromptu BBQ and ended up hanging outside for about 20 minutes, and I got chewed to bits. Maybe I need to buy the neighbors their own mosquito device??? Or start carrying mine with me? 

4. Automotive Technology: Earlier this week, I found myself looking up automotive technology programs at local colleges. Is this the second career I need? Is this a(n over)reaction to too many recalls on my car? Is this a cry for help? I like cars, but I’ve never really been interested in learning how they work. My father would be delighted to help me, I’m sure. (He tried to teach me how to change my own oil back in the late 90s and… I resisted.) But I often find myself wishing I had more automotive knowledge. Mainly when the mechanic is telling me I NEED a part that costs $800. Maybe it would be kind of cool to reinvent myself as an auto mechanic. This is not going to happen, but it’s fun to think about. 

5. Shame Spiral: I am on one (1) group chat, and honestly I don’t know if a group text is the same thing as a group chat, and those two points should really Tell You Something. Anyway, I responded to a message with something that I meant to be silly and fun, and no one responded, and I have been analyzing it backwards and forwards since yesterday afternoon and feeling worse and worse and more and more sure that my (probably former) friends are not only going to cut me out of the group chat, but out of their lives completely. It wasn’t even that BAD, I don’t think; at most it was a) not funny or b) mildly insulting of someone’s relative’s food choice. But nonetheless: SHAME SPIRAL. Also, I am well aware that maybe they didn’t respond simply because it wasn’t response-worthy, or because they went out to dinner or had to deal with a sick child or sat down to watch a movie or or or. I may be a narcissist, but I am aware of it. Anyway, despite all my coping thoughts of narcissism and “people who are your friends will forgive you the occasional dumb comment,” I continue to spiral. I am the most awkward person on the planet and do not deserve friends. Probably at least some of this has to do with me submitting a short story to my critique group and being sure they are texting each other behind my back about the best way to break it to me that the story is not really a story and also sucks balls. But also I haven’t had A Friend Group since college and we didn’t text back then anyway and I don’t know how to be a person or what I’m doing trying. Fretting about how they are texting each other about how to respond to my stupid attempt at humor is what I AM doing. 

There. That’s my Friday morning for you, Internet! What’s up with you?