In my school’s lunchroom, the tables consisted of three types of people.
Table one was the “it” crowd: the popular kids, the jocks, the pretty people, the rich kids, the girls every guy wanted to take to prom. Table two held the drama kids: more pretty people, the over-the-top dramatics, the trend-setters, and a few crossovers from table one. Table three, the nerds: the DnDers, the math clubbers, the future billionaires, the socially awkward, the mostly-disinterested in the other two tables.
I was at the fourth table.
My table held a mashup of the other three tables; we had a couple of jocks who moonlighted as percussion in our high school band. We had a few brainy folks who table-hopped because they didn’t connect in the same nerdy ways as table three’s members did. We had one or two popular kids, too, who were popular because of their uncanny abilities to make the entire school adore them, which left them free to float from table to table with ease and grace.
Those were the people I wished I could be, but I wasn’t a floater. (I had no grace; no ease.)
I wasn’t what I would call a total dork. I had a brother who was athletic, lending me a bit of an in with the jocks. I was artistic and musical, and the drama kids liked to have me around from time to time because of those similar interests. But I was an introverted band geek who worked hard at maintaining her first floutist position in band and directed the pit orchestra for the school’s musicals like it was her goal in life (it wasn’t). I had huge plans to flee my small town and do something amazing once I was free of school and could kick the dust off of my heels, losing it and everyone else in that small town. I didn’t really fit into any social category, and my unimpressiveness was a shield I clutched tightly as I threw my way through my high school years.
Now, I’ve grown into myself. I’ve become something else—something other than that quiet girl who buried herself in oversized hoodies and pretended she didn’t see anyone as she walked through the halls of her high school. I’ve become comfortable; I’m at ease with myself.
But I now have a daughter who belongs at table one, and I’m suddenly feeling a familiar shakiness in the knees.
I have no idea what I’m doing
I can still remember my daughter’s entrance into the world: she was angry, purple, and perfect.
She took her sweet time getting here, arriving a week late and putting me through eleven hours of what I was told was not active labour (despite contractions coming 3 minutes apart for that entire period) and then another thirteen hours of mayhem when I finally did reach active labour. I worked my butt off to bring her into the world, and when she was finally placed in my arms, I was hooked. I treasured that little blonde angel that had finally become mine.
I had no idea that she’d be just as treasured and cherished by her classmates, but she is, and she’s only in the fourth grade. On the rare occasions that I’m allowed to meet her at the school doors, where I stand holding on to my youngest’s little hand as he waits for his favourite person in the world to grace us with her presence, I’m amazed at her troupe of friends who call to her, embrace her, and vocalize their adoration for her as we head back to the car.
In those moments of awe, I’m transported back to my own school days, when no one shouted out their love for me; no one lamented that they wouldn’t see me again for a whole, agonizing day. I had friends, sure—great ones, actually—but my friendships at that age were generally those of convenience or proximity. True bonds eventually formed, of course, but this open show of admiration is completely foreign to me.
I don’t know how to raise a daughter who is living a completely different social experience. I don’t know how to help her come through it with all of the pieces of her good, good heart intact while also teaching her the importance of being there for others, too.
But I have a sneaking suspicion she’s already better at taking care of her friends than I ever was with my own. Their open adoration of her whole person might just be evidence of that fact, and I don’t know what to do with the experience she’s living.
Mine was completely different.
A compassionate conflict
I may not have been the coolest little band nerd to walk through the cafeteria, but I learned an awful lot about kindness in those days.
I learned to appreciate genuine kindness from people I didn’t expect. I learned to be kind to people, too, and to sense who needed that kindness the most, even if it was the school bully. When you’re not constantly praised and adored, I believe it’s easier to be a compassionate person. That may sound backwards, but maybe all that adoration fogs everything up, making it harder to see the forest through the trees.
Compassion is really important to me—it’s important to our culture and society. I think it’s key to leading with kindness in a world where people care more about followers and likes than they do about the state of the human condition. We need people who are less concerned with the face staring back at them in the mirror and more concerned with the heart that beats within. We need people who care more about caring for others than fulfilling their own desires.
My daughter has a heart of pure gold, and I’m worried it will be tarnished. In the same way that being bullied in school can give you inner strength and the ability to fight adversity, not being bullied can prevent you from seeing what others are going through. That smart guy in class might be on his way to Harvard, but to get there, he might also spend his days walking through the hell that school is to those who stand out in all the worst ways.
My daughter might not do it intentionally, but if I do this whole parenting thing wrong, she might add to his hell without having any idea she’s doing it. Compassion is taught, and I only hope the compassion she receives in life will be all she needs to dole it out in spades. If not, I’m terrified of what that might look like.
Mean girls
Regina George might be a fictional character, but Rachel McAdams played her so well that she made me feel like a nervous, nerdy high schooler every time she waltzed on screen.
I knew girls like her. They were beautiful and fashionable and chased after by everyone else’s crush and could be really, really nice to you. But “nice,” as Regina George demonstrates, is not always the same as “kind.” Nice is, oddly enough, the least nice thing someone can be to a socially awkward kid. It would be kinder to ignore us completely, in fact.
My daughter is genuinely kind. She believes in fairness and equality, and I love that about her. But she already has friends who are a little Regina George-y and it concerns me that the influence they hold over her might be a bit stronger than my own. As the kid who grew up dreading attention from anyone, good or bad, I can’t relate to my daughter’s extroversion, but I can remind her how life is different for those of us who were never in the cool kids’ corner.
Hopefully she’ll forge her own way, the Reginas of the world be damned.
Socially anxious mom
At the heart of it all, I’m socially anxious, and I know that’s a big part of what concerns me. I was a loner as a kid (I still am, truthfully), and I’ve always been pretty okay with that lifestyle. I saw my friends in school often enough, but we didn’t spend time together every day, and I liked my little after-school routine of doing my homework in my room while the afternoon TV schedule played out as background noise (The Urban Peasant was oddly soothing and conducive to school work.)
My daughter is a completely different story. She craves her friends’ presence the second she gets home from school, where she instantly hops on her Messenger Kids app to join boisterous group chats and video calls, barely missing a beat in her social life. In fact, this has been happening so much since we set up her Messenger that we have had to impose a time limit on her phone usage. As a kid who didn’t even care that she didn’t have her own phone line (yes, I’m that old), the idea of needing that much chit-chat is a foreign concept.
And it’s grating. I can’t explain what it is, but her constant need for social interactions with her friends is irritating. I try to keep my house open to her friends, too, because, as my husband always reminds me, if they’re not here, she’s spending time at other kids’ houses, and we’ll have no idea what’s going on in her life. But honestly, I would rather my little family be left alone every night for our quiet, happy dinners and daily routines. I thrive on routine.
But my daughter doesn’t, and I have to wrap my brain around that fact.
She and I are different. How two socially awkward introverts managed to have a beautiful, outgoing, extroverted social butterfly is beyond me, but here we are. I may have no idea what I’m doing, but I do know one thing: I will do anything to help my daughter grow into a strong, confident, caring woman.
If that means that I have to embrace socializing every day, and that I have to accept a gaggle of noisy girls in my bubble on a daily basis, then I’ll do that. I’ll open my bubble; I’ll let down my band-nerd induced guard.
I guess at the end of the day, that’s what parenting is all about: letting down your walls in order to help your kids with theirs. If I’m equipped for anything, it’s loving my kids, so that’s a sacrifice I’ll happily (begrudgingly) make.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Dom Hill on Unsplash