Your Mom Was Never as Cool as Me!!!

I had an interesting night with Munchkin last night. The Boy had to sleep by himself because I had some big sistering/mothering to do that required some snuggling:-) I am not sure that I had any great advice, but I do know that I helped, and I feel good about that!

The issue was related to a friend of hers. It is an older girl (the girl is probably 15) that she has known since she started school here and has played some sports with and some other stuff. She was one of the girls who was originally assigned as sort of a "mentor" to Munchkin when she started in school here (the school is really good with new kids and assigns a couple older kids to kind of show them around) and she definitely looks up to her.

Well, that girl has a boyfriend, and apparently this weekend she and the boyfriend decided to...ahem...seal the deal. All well and good, but I think we all know how kids are (ok...boys...I am blaming this on boys...) and word spread around pretty quickly. And those sorts of rumors are much worse on girls than they are on boys.

So, yesterday, her friend was the school slut, and a tramp and a whore and is probably pregnant and probably has 4,000 different STDs and yada, yada, yada. Really, I am sure that all of you know exactly how these things work.

But my little Munchkin, despite being a super tough chick, is also very, very sensitive, and she doesn't like seeing bad things said about people, especially her friends. So, she was bothered by the whole thing...by the way people spread the rumor, to the things they said about this girl to the way it reflects so differently on boys and girls. And, her way of dealing with things...which is to sit and talk about it openly and rationally, doesn't work when it is a quickly spreading rumor and a sort of mass piling on.

Again, she can be very sensitive, and things like this effect her. She has had no problem in asking her friends not to pick on the outcasts in their class...and at least two other kids have reported to their parents that they felt left out and picked on until Munchkin made an effort to get everyone to be nicer to them. She doesn't like when people are put down solely for the purpose of making others feel better about themselves.

Is this going to be a problem? Most likely, yes. She is approaching an age where kids begin to get very, very insecure, and that insecurity tends to manifest itself in meanness. Clearly, there will be more things like this going forward, despite her own efforts to not engage in that kind of behavior.

I have said it before on a bunch of occasions...she is very different from the other kids she goes to school with, and other kids her age. Some of it is her background, some of it is that she lives with me and not with a parent, and some of it is just how she is. She has great friends and some girls that she is extremely close with...but she is definitely different than them all in some obvious ways, and this is one of them. She is cool enough and confident enough to not be bothered by people saying things about her (at least I don't think she would be), but she doesn't react well to those same things being said about other people.

So, I don't really know. I tried checking my Motherhood manual for the chapter on dealing with this, and for some reason I just seem to have misplaced that book;-). I am sort of flying blind here, and I am not exactly sure what I should do. All I know how to do is listen to her, help her talk through her feelings and tell her how great I think she is. And snuggle:-) I can do that, too.

She seemed fine this morning, and I am sure that the whole thing will blow over today as these things usually do. Crisis averted? We shall see...