I have been very blessed in my life as a mother. My kids are easy to take care of and easy to discipline. They have been healthy and un-injured, never in pain beyond what a round of antibiotics or a Band-aid could cure. So I know I’m looking at this from a pretty limited point of view, but I have no hesitation when I say–the hardest part of parenting I’ve found so far, is watching your child not be accepted for who she is.
We went to Chick-fil-A today for Jacey to play while Rylan watched and screamed at her through the window and I drank tea. At 1:00 on a school day, the play place is pretty empty. There were only two other girls there. They were probably five or so–I heard their moms say something about “they’ll never want to go to school if they know this is what we do during the day!”– and they were clearly good friends.
From the outside, I suppose it’s easy to understand why those girls wouldn’t want to play with Jacey Dae. They were having a good time together, and then here comes this little girl who they don’t know, who is obviously younger than they are, who talks funny.
But. As Jacey’s mama, it’s hard to watch her want so desperately to play, and watch them reject her. I sat out there and watched her follow them around the play place, trying to play with them, talking to them, trying to do what they did. As girls do, the big girls joined together to display a united front against the new kid. They stood together, facing Jacey, not letting her into their group. They climbed up on the window sill and didn’t leave room for Jacey to get up there with them. (Never mind that I would’ve told her to get down, and those girls did get in trouble from their moms later for getting up there.) They climbed up on top of the slide, where there was barely room for one, much less two, and definitely not three.
I wanted so badly to get in there and make those girls be nice to my girl. To go tell them that they were being mean and they needed to play with the little girl. It’s what I would tell my daughter if there were some other little girl in there. I even thought about pointing out the situation to their moms.
I know, though, that Jacey needs to learn how to deal with these things herself. She needs to know how to handle mean girls and rejection. I can’t always jump in and protect her from everybody, everywhere, always.
But it was heartbreaking when she came out and told me, “Those girls won’t play with me because they said I’m a stranger. I wanted to play with them!”
And later, when she came out and said, “The girl in the pink dress is mean, but the girl with the purple flowers is nice.” And then to watch the “nice” girl tell Jacey she didn’t want to play with her.
Of course, I looked to use this as one of those ever-present teachable moments. I told Jacey that it’s not nice to call one of the girls mean. And also, I said, we should be nice to everyone, even people who we think are mean.
Later, when I went into the play place to let Rylan crawl around, one of the girls was in there, and Jacey told me, “That’s the mean one.” I told her again that it wasn’t nice to call her mean, and Jacey said, “But I don’t know her name!” With a prompt, she asked the girl her name. And she answered. Then her friend came back in.
“What’s your name?” Jacey asked her.
“I’m not going to tell you,” she said. Then, to her friend, “Don’t tell her.” This is the “nice” one, remember.
Finally, since I was right there, I intervened. “That’s not very nice,” I told her.
“But I don’t know her name,” she told me.
“She’d tell you if you asked,” I replied. (Incidentally, Jacey wasn’t really hurt by all this, just confused. At that point, she told me, “I’m Jacey, but she doesn’t know that.”)
The girl paused, thinking of another excuse. Finally, she said what I think was the main reason the girls weren’t being very welcoming of Jacey Dae. “She kind of talks English.”
And I was really mad at this girl. Even though I think she was too young to know how hurtful that could be.
“She has some problems with talking,” I told her. “She has to go to speech class to learn how to talk well.”
And Jacey said, “But I did learn how to talk!” and then, to that girl, she said, “I can talk well,” which is said just with a funny little accent and with a “d” for the “c” in “can.” It was totally understandable, though.
The girl just looked at us like we were aliens.
We left shortly after that, and had a Jacey-initiated conversation on the way home about what it is to be mean and why we should be nice to people who are mean. And the whole time I was telling her how to be nice, I knew that I desperately wanted to be mean to those little girls for being mean to my girl.
I was irrationally mad at those five-year-olds for shutting out my child, and I was mad at the moms for sitting there and talking and not even noticing that their girls were rejecting another girl. And for not teaching them to be nice to other kids to start with (even though they very well may have; it just takes a while for lessons like that to become second nature to kids).
I wanted to jump in and do anything I could to protect my baby. That mama bear instinct is a hard one to tame.
While I have realized in the past that Jacey didn’t make friends as easily as she could thanks to her speech, today was the first time I actually saw her speech impediment as a real disability and what can go along with that.
It hurts to see.
I’m so thankful that she has some friends at church who are beginning to be able to understand her, and that those kids are much more understanding of her speech issues. So thank you, church mamas, for teaching your kids how to be nice–for real.
And watch out, world, for this mama bear.
