Girl drama in the neighborhood this evening. Callie walked down the street and found Beatrice* reading a note from Hero* after an unspecified fight. The note called Beatrice “pissy.” Callie (who has previously liked both Beatrice and Hero equally) helped Beatrice write her response and delivered the second note. I heard about it when Hero’s mother (my friend and Sunbeam partner) called to ask if Callie said anything about why Beatrice wrote a mean note to Hero that included, among other epithets, the “b-i-t-c-h” word. Callie is six. (Okay, almost seven. Still. And her mother swears. But not that word!)
I asked Callie to tell me what happened. She didn’t want to. She wouldn’t look at me. We sat on the porch swing in the backyard, and she spoke to her bowl of brown fried rice (fiber! not as tasty as refined rice!).
It took awhile, but I got most of the story: that she hadn’t been told what the fight was about, but she was solidly on Beatrice’s side because Hero was mean to her friend. (Wasn’t Hero her friend too?) She confessed that she’d told Beatrice two really mean words to say to Hero, but she couldn’t tell me what they were. I did the whole “I’m not mad at you I just need to know what happened” routine and still she demurred. “You’re going to be really mad, Mom,” she said. Finally she whispered that she’d suggested the words “stupid” and “brat.”
I asked how she felt, how she thought Hero felt, Beatrice felt.
I’m aghast, of course, at such casual cruelty, but struck again by how quickly children can work their way to remorseful empathy, given only the opportunity.
And at least she’s not a sociopath.
*not their real names.
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It grieves me to say it, but even sweet little girls are sinners at heart. Civilization is only skin deep.
The whole ‘friendship’ thing is tough, perhaps even tougher if you are a girl (I remember alot of meanness among girls when I was a kid). I guess most of us want to be liked, and most of us want to be loyal to our friends, whatever age we are. Even us adults find it hard sometimes to work out what the right thing to do is
I don’t seem to have had any of these issues with my boys so far. Their disputes are fiery and usually physical, but afterwards it is all very quickly forgotten…until the next scrap lol.