So today is the first day. It’s the day I say I’m going to pour my words out non-stop for 31 days. It’s a lot. I made a proclamation. I committed to 31 days of writing along with a whole mess of my Clumsy Blogger friends. I chose the “family” category in the challenge because that seems to be where I spend most of my time anyway. Family is my full time job, it’s my side gig, and all the other pieces of my life tend to revolve around family. This very blog has been committed to faith, family, and food so this shouldn’t be so much of a stretch except that it’s every day. Every. Day. We all may be sick of me by Halloween.
Speaking of being sick of people. I am. I am sick of some people. Mostly mean girls. I was tired of them when I was in middle school and, as it turns out, I’m still sick of them as my daughter enters middle school. I’m also sick of them in my son’s 4th grade class but, seriously folks, I have to pace myself. I can’t run out of stories in the first week. 31 days is a lot of in-a-row-writing.
I digress.
Mean girls.
I have a dear friend that shares car pool with me. She drives to the middle school in the morning. I drive in the afternoon. It saves us time and frustration because, and I know this may be shocking, but their are mean mom girls in the car line at school. Our car pool consists of our daughters and a sweet boy that lives on my friend’s street. I love driving them home because they chat loudly and over each other about their day and I hear bits and pieces of what is going on in the halls and classes and hearts. I hear about fights and tests and locker jams. I hear about crushes and awkward glances. I love it.
One day this week, as their sweat smelling selves jumped into my truck (It was still so hot in Houston this week!) they were united in story, albeit not in the way the story was told. Words. Yelling. Shouts of outrage. It was flying at me from the back seat faster than I could take it in.
“Stop! Everyone get your words situated after you get your seat belts buckled. I can’t understand any of you.” Words after safety.
It turns out that my daughter had a full on happening with a mean girl. The story was rushed and loud but it involved a PE locker room, a cock roach (which you can’t even fully understand if you have never seen a Texas cock roach), a mean girl snatching my daughter’s shoe, and a declaration of “Don’t ever touch my stuff again!”
Apparently a roach was on the loose and the mean girl grabbed my daughter’s shoe to smash it. My daughter told her to put it down and the girl said something cool like, “I certainly can’t use my shoe. I have good shoes!” and smashed the bug anyway. With my girl’s favorite mint green running shoes. And then proceeded to wipe the bug guts on the bench,with guts and crushed wings falling to the floor where her PE clothes were laying.
Tammy Church Worker told my daughter and her friends that sometimes kids are mean. I told them that mean kids are usually sad about something in their own life so they feel the need to bully and make other kids feel bad. Tammy Church Worker believes those things. I told them we all have to keep smiling at mean kids and saying hello and being kind but that we know people who do mean things to us are not our real friends and we don’t have to spend time with them. Tammy Church Worker believes that as well.
But Mama Bear Tamara wanted to find the girl and smash a thousand cock roaches on her pretty shirt. Mama Bear Tamara wanted to get a mega phone and announce mean and nasty things about the girl. Mama Bear Tamara wanted to tell her daughter to punch the girl in the face. Actually, I may have suggested that and then laughed as if I was joking. Maybe.
My daughter won’t tell me the girl’s name. Maybe she knows that while I spend most of my life in Tammy Church Worker mode that Mama Bear Tamara is a very real person, too. My daughter is probably a much nicer person that I am. I may be a mean girl.
Crap.
Parenting is not for sissies.
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