The Girls from Ames (19 page)

L
ately, when the Ames girls trade emails and phone calls about their daughters’ social situations, they’re often aghast at how girls today treat each other. Day after day, their daughters have to contend with stereotypical mean girls who are adept at belittling them, or pointing out their flaws, or telling them “you don’t belong.”

A couple of the Ames girls have daughters who hover at the edges of their social group, yearning to be more accepted. It can be heart-breaking for a mother to watch, especially these mothers, who feel blessed to have had ten close friends in their childhoods. Some of their children have struggled to make a meaningful connection with just one or two other girls, and even then there’s a risk that the other girls will turn on them.

Here at the reunion, one of the Ames girls describes an incident that upset her twelve-year-old daughter. Her daughter had left her cell phone somewhere, and another girl got hold of it and decided to make some mischief by sending a text message to a certain boy: “I love you. How far will you go with me?” The text messaging became more explicit from there.

The Ames girl’s daughter—she doesn’t want to be identified—was distraught that her friend was pretending to be her. She considered this girl a close confidant, and more than the embarrassment and humiliation she felt, she was upset that the trust between them had been violated. She and the girl remained friendly, but it was a tough lesson about the realities of social interactions today.

Researchers worry about this current generation of girls. Studies suggest that the average girl today is likely to grow up to be a lifelong dieter, to have a distorted body image, and to be emotionally scarred by cliques. Some communities are now hosting girls’ empowerment workshops, where session leaders try to boost girls’ self-esteem. One facilitator who gives such workshops to families in the Midwest, Kimber Bishop-Yanke, leaves parents wincing as she delivers the bad news: “We have a lot of girls walking around saying mean things to themselves: ‘I’m fat, I’m ugly, I’m stupid.’ ” She tells parents to notice body language: “When a girl doesn’t feel confident, you can watch her body shrink.” At her workshops, she offers a host of warning signs: Many girls get heavier before they shoot up in height, so comments from parents or mean-spirited peers about their weight can be traumatizing. There is also great peer pressure in today’s sexualized culture: If girls’ bodies haven’t yet developed, they may be shunned by their cliques. That’s why parents such as the Ames girls are being told that it’s crucial to monitor influences in girls’ lives—to know not just their friends, but their friends’ parents.

A 2008 study titled “A National Report on the State of Self-Esteem” labeled girls’ low self-esteem “a national crisis.” In part because of bullying and the troubling way girls sometimes interact, 70 percent of girls feel they don’t measure up to others. In the study, conducted by StrategyOne, an applied research firm, 75 percent of girls with low self-esteem engaged in harmful activities, such as disordered eating, cutting themselves or being mean to other girls.

Just before the reunion at Angela’s, the Ames girls traded emails about the mean-girl factor in their kids’ lives. Several of them commented, in essence: “We were never like that.”

When Jenny read those email exchanges, she felt she had to say something. “Oh yes, we were certainly like that,” she typed back. She reminded them: In their heart of hearts, they know they had their mean streaks, too. Jenny was referring mostly to a 1980 incident that, using modern-day parlance, they now call “the intervention.” By definition, that’s when a group of people get together to help a mutual friend straighten out her life. But that’s not really what happened that night in 1980, and the girls know it.

For years, they’ve mostly resisted mentioning that incident to each other, because some of them feel too embarrassed and guilty. Even here at the reunion, despite the deep reminiscing going on, there’s a reluctance to discuss it until Sally gives the OK.

“It’s fine,” says Sally. “I’ve never forgotten what happened, but I’ve forgiven all of it.”

 

 

N
ow a popular fifth-grade teacher in Spencer, Iowa, Sally is funny and laid back, and she carries herself with great self-confidence. She has a good marriage and an easy relationship with her two daughters, twelve and fourteen. People describe her as very together and levelheaded.

When she was young, however, Sally certainly was not the coolest of the Ames girls. In high school, she was part of the group in large measure because Cathy wanted her to be. Cathy’s friendship with Sally—dating back to first grade with Sheila at St. Cecilia—was rooted in loyalty, history and the comfort of familiarity. Cathy also just loved spending time with Sally. Except for Sheila, the other Ames girls didn’t have those same bonds with Sally. They knew she was very smart and sweet, with a big heart and a sure sense of humor. But they also found her to be too quiet, too shy, too much of a tag-along, and too clueless around boys. Unlike Marilyn, a square who was comfortable seeing herself as a slight outsider in the group, Sally didn’t have a clear sense of how she fit in, or even how she wanted to fit in.

Given the ambivalent feelings a few of the girls had for Sally, Cathy felt a responsibility to look after her welfare in the group. When all the Ames girls went to a movie, she sat next to Sally. If they were all heading out for fast food, she’d ride there with Sally. If plans were being made for a Saturday night, she’d remind everyone, “Don’t forget to pick up Sally.” At least once, a few of them promised to pick up Sally and never showed up to get her. To this day, her mother still remembers Sally waiting by the door for that promised ride.

Sally and Cathy, then and now

Sally could be fun and likeable, but she also resisted growing up as fast as some of the others, and they were irritated by that. During high school, there was a Halloween costume party, and most of the girls chose to dress in flattering, even provocative, ways. Sally came dressed as a nun, which led to a bit of eye-rolling by some of the other girls.

Then came the school-sponsored East Coast Trip in eleventh grade, which most of the girls signed up for. This was a sightseeing tour of New York, Philadelphia and Washington, and from the time the bus left Iowa, Sally sensed that she was being left out. When all the students went together to see
Annie,
some of the girls weren’t especially friendly to her. She had trouble connecting with Sheila and Karen. She roomed with Jenny, but Jenny was a bit cool at times. Karla, Diana and Kelly were sometimes off on their own. (The three of them got a restaurant to serve them wine and bought themselves a
Playgirl
magazine. The school had advised all the students to bring raincoats, and so all three bought matching trench coats and walked around New York like teenaged spies. One highlight: ringing the doorbell to get into a “naughty lingerie” shop.)

As all the other girls buddied up, Sally felt alone. In New York one night, some of the girls made plans to go to a restaurant, and Sally overheard someone saying, “Why does Sally have to come with us?” To her face, someone else said, “Oh, you’re coming, too?” That night at dinner, Sally was ordering her meal, and one of the girls—who it was, she can’t recall—actually interrupted her and said, “We don’t care what you want!” There was a bit of snickering around the table.

Sally saw clearly that she was being excluded, but she couldn’t figure out why. She fell asleep saying to herself, “I wonder what I did to them. Why don’t they want to be with me?” She took the hint, though. For the rest of the trip, she palled around mostly with a girl from outside the group, as she counted the hours until the bus would return her to Iowa.

Cathy, her closest friend, hadn’t been on that East Coast adventure. And when everyone returned, a few of the girls took Cathy aside and complained that Sally wasn’t fitting in.

Cathy talked to her mother about the problem. “I should have gone on the East Coast trip,” she said. “If I had been there with Sally, none of this would have happened. Now they’re ganging up on her and I don’t know what to do.” The girls saw her as Sally’s keeper and held her responsible. At the same time, she felt completely protective of Sally, her oldest and sweetest friend.

Her mother listened and then weighed in. “If the girls have a problem with Sally, rather than being mean to her behind her back, they ought to get together to discuss things maturely. Invite them over to our house. You can all hash things out here.” It was well-meaning advice. Cathy’s mother assumed the girls would talk, hug and move on.

A slumber party was planned, and the girls arrived at Cathy’s house with their sleeping bags. They first made small talk with Cathy’s mom, then headed down to the basement, where they sat in a circle on the carpeted floor. Some of the girls were busy elsewhere and didn’t make it over that night. Still, enough of them showed up to make a full circle.

Cathy was going to serve as a sort of moderator, but she had only to introduce the issue and the other girls immediately started running with it. At first, there were nitpicking comments. The girls said they were bugged by the way Sally dressed, talked and ate. They talked about her lack of skills at Friday night parties. “You just kind of stand there,” someone said. “You don’t participate in the party.”

Another of the girls chimed in with “You’ve got to be more fun. Participate more! Talk to the boys. You’re like a wallflower. And when one of us stands up to go to the next room, you don’t have to stand up and follow us. You’re too much of a tag-along.”

It went on like that for a while, with the girls telling Sally everything they found wrong with her. And there seemed no clear sense that the piling on would ever end, since no one had anywhere to go. This was, after all, a sleepover.

Cathy sat next to Sally through all of it, as if proximity could protect her friend from some of the verbal pummeling. Cathy knew this “intervention” was not what her mother had anticipated, but she couldn’t find the words, or maybe the courage, to defend her friend forcefully enough. Even though Cathy wasn’t agreeing with the other girls, just by being in the room she felt like a co-conspirator.

As the girls listed her alleged shortcomings, Sally felt stunned. She thought to herself, “I still don’t get it. What did I do?” But she couldn’t muster up those words to deliver them. She just sat there, feeling her heart beating in her chest, barely defending herself. And then, finally, someone said it: “We’re not sure you should be hanging out with us anymore. You’re too different from us.”

Sally looked over at Cathy, who had tears welling up in her eyes. Everyone was silent, looking down in their laps, until Sally finally spoke. “OK. . . . OK. . . . If that’s how you feel . . . OK.”

For Sally, there would be no slumber party. In her head she was thinking, “Well, screw all of you!” But she couldn’t bring herself to say that. She gathered up her stuff, said good-bye, and quietly left. Only after she was out the door did she allow herself to cry.

When she got to her house, Sally went into her mother’s bedroom. By then, she was really bawling. She felt devastated. After hearing the whole story, her mother told her: “You know, they aren’t necessarily the nicest group of girls.” Her mom encouraged Sally to strengthen her relationships with other, less catty girls at school. “You’re a great person. You have other girls in your life. They’ll be nicer friends for you.”

Sally’s mother didn’t consider getting on the phone with other parents to complain about what their daughters had said and done. That might be how such matters play out these days, when parents seem so overprotective, but back then parents tended to be more hands-off. Besides, Sally’s mother knew any meddling by her wouldn’t make the other girls embrace Sally. If they didn’t want her daughter in their clique, then good riddance.

 

 

L
ooking back decades later, Sally says the intervention was truly a defining moment for her, devastating and painful, but at the same time liberating and life-changing. “Some of what was said had been true,” she says. “I wasn’t always comfortable around the guys they were hanging out with. Some of them even scared me a little.

“After feeling beat up by my friends and going home and telling my mom, she said exactly what I needed to hear. She did not go to the other moms to try to fix everything. Instead, she reminded me that I was a smart, funny, kind person who had a lot to offer and I had plenty of other friends.

“This was a great lesson in parenting for me. It is not our job, as parents, to go to coaches, teachers and other parents and try to make everything run smoothly for our kids. A lot of parents try talking to the teacher to get something special for their children. They talk to coaches to get their kids more playing time. They’re trying to make everything just right for their kids. They want a perfect world for them. But I’ve come to see that our job is to help our kids become people who are capable and believe in themselves enough to deal with the world. Our job is to help our kids function in the world. And that’s why my mother’s response was such an ‘aha!’ moment for me. I watched her do that.”