Rebecca is 11 now, but young for her grade--she's a November baby--and we are in middle school. I say "we" because every day I go to school or camp with her in spirit, and every day all day in the back of my mind I am thinking: How's it going? Is she okay? --Which goes for Suzanne, too, but at 7 Suzanne is very much a Princess of Childhood. Rebecca, on the other hand, is dealing with bullies.
She's a natural mark. There's the age thing, which means that some of these girls are almost a year older--which at this age, can be a lot. And there is the ADD, which manifests itself in a variety of ways, many of them socially awkward. She is hypersensititive to noise, for instance; she interrupts people all the time; sometimes she doesn't seem to track conversations. (In fact, she pays attention to a lot, but acquaintances don't always know this). And since ADD is a problem with regulation of all kinds, she often has trouble getting to sleep at night and then is grumpy the next day, or she flares into inappropriate anger at little frustrations.
Everyone at this age is going through awkward adjustments, I know, but this very fact means that there are girls in her social world who are dealing with their own issues via a kind of social aggression that girls in our culture seem to know how to do by the age of three. It's easy. The victim makes a remark; you roll your eyes. She wears shorts to school one day: you snicker behind her back. She gets mad, you feign bafflement: "What did I do?"--so she looks like a spaz. You enlist a clique--which is easy, too, since there are always girls around who desperately need to belong to one--and you pass notes back and forth making fun of her hair. You call her at home and when she answers you hang up, giggling. You enlist somebody to bump up against her in the hallway on purpose, and then say she was the one who did it on purpose. And since none of this is provable, she looks like a crybaby or a paranoid or both, and you get to have fun. Mean fun.
And if you are the mom of a girl who's getting picked on like this, what do you do? You tell her to buck up, that it won't last forever. You give her some snappy comebacks, hoping it will help, and suspecting that when the adrenalin hits she won't be able to remember a single one. You give her a shoulder to cry on. And if things get bad, you go down to the school and raise hell with people until you get a reputation as "difficult" and you know, you just know, that your file is somewhere with a special yellow tab sticking out on it saying "helicopter parent." One day you worry that you're making too much of it, that you're teaching your daughter to be a professional victim, and the next day you worry that you aren't doing enough.
And every once in a while, you get something right--which what happened today. Today, I pick Rebecca up from camp, where a certain girl has been giving her grief, and I say to her hopefully, "How'd it go today, sweet pea?" And she says, "AWEsome." And it turns out that today the Mean Girl said something snarky about why was Rebecca even THERE, because she had said she was going to the office with her DAD, so, like, what is the DEAL? And Rebecca said sweetly (so she reported), "Oh, you know, our plans changed last night, and I didn't have your phone number so I couldn't let you know. My bad!" And, for once, the Mean Girl didn't have a thing to say. Yay, us.
