Tonight, on the way home from Mass for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, K got a text. “H’s mom just sent me a text,” she said to the backseat. “H is coming to your birthday party and is very excited about it.” An affirming thought: someone other than family likes our kid. Yes, it’s sort of an obvious assumption in a sense: by age nine, most every kid has learned how to make friends with someone.
And yet, there’s the girl that sits in our lunchroom at school every single day alone. One of the sweetest young ladies I’ve ever had the privilege to teach, and yet without a single friend some days. “I just like being alone,” she said once when I plopped down across from her during lunch with my salad and began chatting. And I believed her: I was a bit of a loner myself, and I sometimes thought being alone was just easier than dealing with the uncertainties of other people. So here’s this thirteen-year-old who can’t or doesn’t want to make many friends, and I realize that it’s entirely possible that L might have made it to nine without making any real friends.
What is friendship at that age, though? Just a few weeks ago she was complaining about how some of the very people she’s invited to her birthday party were being none-too-friendly toward her — the usual petty playground stuff. Can she tell when people are really her friends and when they’re just using her, I’ve wondered. How accurate is the perception of a young girl?
The tough parenting moments for me came in middle school, when a friend of many years decided that my daughter bought her no social capital — no entry into the coveted group. So she dropped her. Two years later — same thing from another “friend.” Things got significantly better in high school, but I tell you, middle school for me was tough. I’ve written about this before on your blog and K sympathized that the petty squabbles of pre-teens and teens were not familiar to us in Poland. I first encountered them here, with my daughters, especially with my older one. (The younger one learned, from observing, how to protect herself.)
Congrats on your 3000th! Keep on writing!
I see it daily as an eighth-grade teacher. We experienced the same thing when I was a kid here, but the viciousness of it now is incomprehensible. Add to it the cyber dimension and the fact that kids nowadays really can’t escape it simply by leaving the physical space where the nonsense is going on — I’d had to be a kid now, and I worry about what will happen to L as it intensifies, because just dumping a friend is not enough now. You also have to show you’re cool by turning completely on them.