Odd Girl Out (36 page)

Parents are bit players in the national conversation on bullying. Our attention is fastened on the aggressors, their targets, and silent peers. Critics have faulted television and movies for stoking the culture of peer violence. The role of parents, however, is often reduced to bitter epilogues of disasters: parents who did too little, too late, or who did nothing at all.

In this chapter, I present five mothers talking about their girls' experiences with bullying and explore what teachers face in responding to them. Each parent has a unique story, and like her daughter, brings her own set of personal memories and beliefs to the episode. The stories illustrate parents' influence over their daughters' social choices. They reveal how a culture that silences and invalidates female aggression affects the way parents respond to their children's pain.

 

blame

Patricia runs a small child-care facility in Ridgewood. When I visited her at the end of the day, she was wearing a long, untucked collared shirt over rumpled khaki pants. Her tall sturdy frame suggested an ability to fix just about anything, from a shoelace to a lawn mower. Her voice was surprisingly gentle and low, and her eyes drifted across the playroom to where a lone child played quietly, awaiting her mother. We are both tall women, and as we plunked down to talk on tiny chairs at a round table, our knees popped halfway up to our chests. She grinned and shrugged, reddening slightly.

Patricia never expected that four years after moving here with Ben and their daughter, people in town would still treat them as though they'd just unloaded their truck. When Ben was hired as a senior pharmacist, an impressive promotion so early in his career, he had promptly moved the family to Ridgewood midway through Hope's third-grade year.

When Hope started school after the winter holidays, her sudden appearance troubled her peers. She was met with quick skepticism by the other girls and deemed a threat to existing cliques. What began as a brief shunning stretched into a yearlong hazing. Hope knew she was being challenged because she had not grown up in town, but the longer she lived in Ridgewood, the easier it became to blame herself.

By fifth grade Hope had fallen in with a group of girls from the church who attended choir and Sunday school. At school, the clique leader often asked Hope to go somewhere else for the day or made rude comments about Hope's looks or personality. When Patricia asked her daughter why she stayed friends with them, Hope insisted it was better when they were at church together.

One day in sixth grade, one of the girls informed Hope that the group did not want to be her friend anymore. For several weeks afterward, they refused to acknowledge her existence. "She was just left," Patricia said, her eyes filling with tears. "Every day after school, she'd come home crying. 'They don't like me today. They don't want to be my friend anymore. What do I do? Why don't they like me? What's wrong with me? Why can't I be friends? Why don't they want to be friends with me?' What do you say?" she asked pleadingly.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Well, it was a very emotional time," Patricia said, clearing her throat, her shaken voice righting itself. She leaned back in the chair and stretched her long legs. "I'm sure a lot of it had to do with her growing up, you know, her period starting and all that stuff, a lot of emotions come with that, too." Listening to her, I wondered if Patricia was edging away from the center of her child's pain, ascribing it to the "legitimate" factors affecting child development.

Patricia asked her daughter if there was any truth to her clique's critical remarks. "I asked if there were some things within herself that she'd like to change." Hope tried to come up with a couple of ideas, then retorted that she didn't know what else she could do. I asked Patricia if she thought Hope should have changed herself.

"Hope has a very outgoing personality," Patricia explained, sounding almost apologetic. "She's very bubbly. And she can be silly. I guess I don't know the right word for her personality. But I think she could get on people's nerves. It might really rattle them. And they might get tired of it. She felt like she could calm down a little bit, you know, not be so boisterous or outspoken." In the absence of an explanation for her daughter's torment, Patricia could do little but suspect it was Hope's fault. She begged Hope to find other friends. Hope refused. She said they were her only friends.

Patricia tried to comfort her daughter by asking her to pray. "Even though it's very hard right now, we know that God can use this to bring good in your life somewhere. You may not see it today or tomorrow." She paused. "I'm trying not to cry."

We sat in silence.

"I wanted to go to those girls and say, 'Do you realize what you're doing!' I wanted to go and tell their mothers, you know, but then you stop and think, 'Okay, I'm hearing one side.' I trust Hope and I believe that she's honest with me, but you don't want always to think that my child will never do anything wrong.

"If it had turned into something where I thought Hope was really suffering or going into a depression, or you know, having really physical or health problems, I probably would have done things a little differently," Patricia said. "A lot of it I felt like, this is just part of life. You have to learn how to deal with people who don't always treat you fairly." And here, Patricia expressed society's approach to bullying through her parenting philosophy, even as she sat before me, shoulders slumped in a small chair, brushing tears away, questioning her own words.

When I asked what she would have done differently, she sighed and looked at me squarely. "I wish I had gone ahead and tried to get those mothers together and sat down with them for coffee or something," she said. "You know, in a nonthreatening way. I would never want them to think that I was saying my child is better. If we had worked though all that then, it might have helped them now. Their support system might have been stronger now."

Patricia's fear of angering other parents stifled her defense of Hope and helped her rationalize Hope's torment. For most mothers I spoke with, the fear of another parent's anger played an uncommonly large role in their response. The first unwritten rule of parenting, I learned, is that no one wants to be told how to raise their child; the second is that criticizing another person's child puts you in peril. Many people interpret criticism of their child's behavior as a veiled attack on their parenting, and they become defensive, sometimes irrationally so. Most parents of targets simply say they just "don't go there."

Mothers especially may harbor fears about engaging in direct conflict. In smaller communities, the social costs of confrontation rise. Mothers may work together, volunteer at school or church, run into each other often, even be friends. Fathers might be current or hoped-for clients. It may be difficult to approach another parent without some aftershocks that reverberate beyond the girls' universe.

At times, bully-target dynamics can spring up between mothers of warring girls, kicking into gear a second tier of indirect aggression and anger. Parents of aggressors are naturally protective of their daughters, and especially when their girls aggress in total secret, often challenge the accusation. The approaching mother, already timid, can be silenced and bullied herself.

 

Jill's experience of bullying brought back a flood of memories for her mother, who was suddenly dropped by her best friends in junior high. For Faye, watching what happened to Jill proved her theory that mean girls are universal and unavoidable. Jill had changed profoundly since being alternately ignored and attended to by her best friend. "She used to be the happiest kid," Faye told me. "She was so happy-go-lucky. She used to float and it was wonderful." Then around first grade, Jill became increasingly shy. When her first best friend dropped her "like a ton of bricks," her self-esteem shrank. Now that Jill's new best friend in fifth grade was treating her nicely only in private, Faye was not going to interfere. There was no sense, she'd concluded, in protecting your child from this. It's everywhere.

This time, the bully was the daughter of Faye's friend. This woman was, according to Faye, powerful, controlling, and socially connected. Because of that, her daughter had many friends. "We have had discussions [about the girls' friendship]," she said, "but you can't tell someone that your daughter is being a bitch." Since Jill had seen trouble in more than one friendship, Faye believed Jill's low self-esteem was to blame for her victimization. "If you don't feel good about yourself and people know it, and people know that this person doesn't like you, then no one else is going to like you."

When I asked her if she'd thought of pursuing her daughter's plight with the school, she balked. "Other mothers might have called the other mother and said, 'What's going on?' And it never occurred to me to do that. It never did. And now I say to myself, 'Should I have called?' Should I have, you know, found out what went on, you see, because my mom was really not involved at all. There were a lot of other issues in her life and this was not something she could clearly see as a problem. And then I think, you know, on a scale from one to ten you have people dying from cancer. This really is not a problem. You know, she will grow up and she will find her good friend. And she'll be okay."

After minutes of trying to minimize her daughter's ordeal, Faye abruptly gave herself over to hopelessness. "She'll have this for the rest of her life. We all do," she said simply.

 

fear

On an icy February morning, I was inching down a backed-up street in Washington, D.C., heading for a lunch interview with the wife of a friend I hadn't seen in many years. Trawling for parking in an underground garage, I remembered that Melissa was bringing along her mother, who was visiting from upstate New York.

When I entered the restaurant, Melissa was holding an armful of shopping bags and standing by the bar. She was about my age, with shiny, curly black hair, narrow shoulders, and a broad, pleasant smile. Barbara, who stood just behind her daughter, was stout and middle-aged, with long, curly salt-and-pepper hair. Both greeted me warmly, though as we were seated I noticed Barbara studying the menu intently.

After diet Cokes and salads were ordered, Melissa began.

"I have to admit that popularity was very important to me," she said, as though she were getting some shameful fact out of the way, confession-style. "I think I was always in the popular group. From the outside, people thought I was great friends with this group. I was always—
always
—thought of as being with that group." The reality, she was quick to add, was different.

Camille had always been her closest friend. She lived in the neighborhood, which made it easy for the girls to carpool to the many afterschool activities they shared. There was swimming, gymnastics, ballet, soccer, Hebrew school. Even when there was nothing to do, Melissa hung out at Camille's house after school.

Camille was cute and magnetic. She seemed to fill the rooms she entered, and though that meant lots of girls to play with, Melissa could not help but feel small in Camille's shadow. She was plagued by the constant hum of being too big, too homely, too uncool. Whenever Melissa liked a boy, the boy liked Camille. When Camille got around guys, she acted stupid and silly and ignored Melissa. At Hebrew school, Camille ditched Melissa if a more popular girl from another school was around. Melissa was often jealous and ashamed.

Camille was best friends with Nicola, who lived across the street, and whenever the two of them got together, they started to lie. They would pretend not to have plans, so that when Melissa asked Camille what she was doing that day, the answer would always be some variation on "Oh, I don't know what I'm doing yet." Undeterred, Melissa called Camille constantly. One time, riding her bike past Camille's house, she saw the two of them chalking the driveway. "Oh, we just got together!" Camille insisted. "We never knew you wanted to come over." Camille made you feel, Melissa told me, "like she would do these obnoxious, mean things so slyly that you couldn't really call her on it."

In seventh grade, Melissa's class was divided, and she was separated from all of her friends except Camille and Nicola. The shift would permanently alter the social chemistry. By October, the two girls had turned on her.

"They basically dropped me as a friend but very slyly," Melissa said, stirring her soda. "They would just not invite me. I was not invited to hang out after school, never included in plans. They were horrible. They made my life hell."

But the illusion of their friendship persisted, and so did Melissa. Only a sharp eye would have seen the truth. "Camille's instinct was to be nice to everyone and to never say a mean thing. She would just be very elusive, very sly." So Melissa still ate lunch with them, even though nobody talked to her. She would go to the bathroom with them, even though one time Camille whirled around and snapped, "Melissa, do you
ever
stop following us?" She would see them together at the movies and want to disappear under the seats.

"I was very social, very outgoing. It was traumatic. I would go home crying every night. But on the other hand, I felt compelled to be part of that group," Melissa remembered.

As she lingered among the girls who mostly ignored her, she recalled, "I got very good at listening to conversations. I remember spying, anything I could do to understand. I walked behind them to hear what they were saying. I got good at investigating."

"Um," Barbara said, clearing her throat. I looked over, for a moment having nearly forgotten she was there. She had been twisting her cocktail napkin into small pieces underneath her tall soda glass, staring at stringy lemon pulp floating near the bottom. Her face seemed frozen.

"Uh, I have to be honest," she said, eyes still downcast. "I encouraged Melissa to be friendly with Camille. I thought, you know, that it would be nice to have a Jewish girl to hang around with."

Melissa gave her mother a quick "that's nice" look. "I remember walking home by myself a lot. I felt very, very lonely. I felt insecure. I felt ugly. Disgusting. Depressed. I'd lay on my bed, thinking these awful thoughts, that people wouldn't even care if..." She trailed off.