One part of being a parent is talking about your child to the authorities. Not the police or FBI, though I’m sure that will come eventually when one of the girls unveils her plans for world domination. It’s not easy raising children whose ambitions lie within the world of comic book supervillains with superpowers of mind control and gas bombs. If there’s a supervillain whose powers are crying on demand, my daughters will be perfect.
Last night we went to parent/teacher conferences for Matilda. The conversation went as expected:
”She’s frighteningly smart, reading at a level far above her peers, always seeking a new challenge and an absolute delight to have in class. But she cries a lot. It’s not that she’s upset all the time, but when something happens, she takes it as a personal failure on her part to not have been able to solve the problem before it became an issue.”
That’s my girl! Frighteningly smart, but overly concerned for the welfare of others. If they are mad at her, she’s not concerned about the actual incident, but rather upset about the course of action she took to correct it. It failed and, therefore, she failed.
The crying thing is something I’ve been trying work on with her. I’ve been talking with Matilda on ways to avoid getting to the point of crying over everything. For example, let’s say you can’t find your belt. What do you do?
Well, she usually breaks down into a mass of apologetic emotion. “I’m so sorry. I lost my belt. Please forgive me.”
”Did you look on your bed?”
”Oh. There it is. Thanks!”
So, we’re looking at using logic to confront the heady emotional issues such as: her ice cream melted, there’s a knot in her shoe lace, her zipper is stuck, they pre-empted Spongebob, it’s raining when the weather said it would be sunny, etc. We’re trying to look at the situations on a per-issue basis and decide, “Hey, should I cry or find a solution?”
Now, what’s odd is that the issues where she should cry she doesn’t. For example, her brownie leader is a pain in the ass. She’s a short, moronic troll who uses the brownie troop to further her own quest for a sense of worth and belonging. It doesn’t work. Because, no matter what she does, she’s a worthless troll. I’ve met her at least FIVE times. One of those times she thought I was kidnapping my own child. But, still, she introduces herself to me and is sure we never met. Oh, if only I could wipe away my memories of her as she does with me. Maybe then the nightmares would end.
She has a tendency to do stupid things that only half the troop is allowed to do. Now, I may be wrong, but I thought that brownies was supposed to teach my child the importance of doing good things as a group, as well as an individual. The rewards for being an individual are badges. The rewards for good group work are group activities.
Not according to Troll. According to her twisted vision of the world, her child gets to do everything, her friends’ children get to do everything and then she’ll let the rest of us know two days before the event, even though it is too late to sign the girls up.
So, does Matilda cry over these things? No. She says, “Mrs. Troll is the worst leader of a quasi-military institution I’ve ever seen. We should report her. I don’t even WANT to go horseback riding with them anyway. I’ll have more fun at home cleaning out my ears with a cheese-grater. Screw her and the Lexus she rode in on. What an idiot.”
And she’s done. She’s not upset because some of her friends get to do something that she doesn’t because she realizes that it was the troll who messed it up. She’s not going to let this woman’s stupidity ruin her day. She goes about her business.
My wife on the other hand is planning to go Medieval on this woman and tell her that she has a) no idea how to run a brownie troop, b) losing kids during meetings is probably a bad thing (oh yes, she has done it), c) sending out a permission slip the day before an event is too late, d) if she’s going to call us and say, “Call me back, it’s URGENT” buy a freaking answering machine. Because now she’s going to blame whatever it was that she messed up on us.
Plus, there’s a perfectly good house on the market that we’d love to buy. Except it’s across the street from her house. No way am I going to live in troll land.
But, it’s okay. Eventually she’ll crumble from the pressure and one of her seven-year-old brownies will have to come and save the day for her.
God I hope I can be there when that happens. To see this woman humiliated by the moral, mental and emotional superiority of a group of seven-year-old girls would be one of the most memorable experiences of my life.
Discuss
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