All Things Woompty

Another thing to thank Mom for

When I was a sophomore in high school, a new girl started the year with us. Her name was Shawna, and she played the clarinet, and she quickly became part of the group of girls that I was friends with that year, a group of girls who were mostly fellow bandmates. She was new, so she was exotic, and that made her more influential than she probably would have been had she started high school with the rest of us the year before. My mother did not trust her, nor did she like her; she had good reason for that.

See, my mom had decided to throw me a surprise slumber party for my 15th birthday, and she invited a small group of girls that she knew. Shawna called and asked if she could bring another girl to the party, another new girl who had started at the school literally a few weeks before the party. My mother very politely told her no, but Shawna showed up that night with the other girl, knowing full well that my mother would not be mean enough to send the girl home. It would have been fine, if that girl had not later been involved in shenanigans involving the pool table in our family room that lead to our sliding glass door being broken, shenanigans which in turn lead to drama surrounding who the hell was going to pay for the door. Shawna lead the charge against me, calling me mean for insisting that her friend pay her share for the replacement door.

But that was minor compared to what Shawna did a few months later.

She was having a birthday party, a slumber party of course, and the whole group of us was invited. It was easily 12-15 girls, and it was all the girls that I socialized with at school every day. Problem was, it was the same weekend my family and I were going to be out of town for one of JM's son's soccer tournaments. And no matter how much pleading I did, no matter whose mother offered to let me stay with them during the weekend so I could still go to the party, my mom insisted that I skip the party and go with the family. I was heartbroken, but my friends all promised to tell me stories on Monday about the party.

Except on Monday when I saw my friends, they weren't speaking to me. Every single one of them was mad at me about something I had apparently done or said behind their backs, something that came out at the party, something Shawna had told them. Somehow, Shawna's party had become a forum for discussing Reasons To Hate Melinda. And Shawna herself had started it all. What she hadn't counted on in her little plan of destruction was the fact that I wasn't going to put up with it. I yelled at her, I yelled at my other friends, I provided explanations for everything I actually said and refuted the lies.

And then I went home and cried my eyes out to my mother. Bawled and bawled and probably ruined her shirt with cheap makeup and snot. I didn't want to go to school the next day, I didn't want to have to face those girls, especially Shawna. My mom patted me on the back, reminded me that I was still awesome (blame her for my overinflated ego), and told me that sorry, I was going to have to go to school and I was going to have to either find new friends or fix this myself. She didn't call the school and complain, she didn't call Shawna's parents and tell them what a horrible little shit their daughter was. Instead, she told me how to deal with the problem and sent me back out there to deal with it.

The next day, I decided to ignore those girls and go talk to some other friends instead. But then a couple of them came over to me and apologized, told me they just got caught up in everything at the party. It took me a few days to forgive the ones who apologized, and I never did trust Shawna again after that, and it really, really sucked while it was going on. Being a teenager is hard enough; being a teenage girl who's being shunned by all of her friends and being psychologically bullied falls under the category of cruel and unusual punishment.

I am, however, glad that my mother had the sense to let me work it out on my own, rather than run interference or play guardian angel. It was a lesson I needed to learn, that sometimes friends stab you the back and sometimes you have to just turn your back and move on.

It is a lesson that Lori Drew's daughter will never get to learn. Instead, her daughter has learned that the way to deal with friendships ending and bullying is to have her mom bully her friends back.

I am at a loss to understand how any reasonable, sane adult thinks that is is okay for them to attack a child via cyber bullying. The fact that she is a parent and that this is the behavior she is modeling for her child makes me want to punch her in the face. It makes me too angry to really write anything coherent about the situation, really; all I keep thinking of to type involves all caps cursing. But Judith Warner wrote an excellent column about this situation, a column that I think every parent should read if just to make them step back and re-evaluate how they parent their children through situations like this one.

I was lucky that the Shawna situation happened in the days before internet harassment was commonplace; the situation would have been 10 times worse if it had been spread all over the world wide web. But I'm even luckier to have had a mom who helped me learn to deal with situations like this on my own. I just hope that someday Lori Drew's daughter learns that lesson herself, despite her mother's efforts to keep it from happening.

posted by Melinda @ 6:45 PM