Last week I wrote a post about how Number 5 totally rejected a kid at her preschool.
There were lots of moms who felt really bad for the little boy.
There were moms who pointed out I could have (and should have) used that as an opportunity to teach my daughter about compassion.
I get it.
I have a super sensitive 8-year-old.
My instinct is to protect him.
To pounce.
To slam anyone who makes him feel bad.
But there are a lot of assholes out there.
Mean people do not go away once you become a teenager.
Or an adult.
In fact, they appear to multiply at that point.
Exponentially.
The other day Number 5 had a little sledding accident.
She slammed face-first into a snow bank and got a pretty good scrape and a little bit of a shiner under her right eye.
For the remainder of the day, she would run into the bathroom to check out her wound in the mirror to “see if it had gone away yet.”
I told her it would take several days to go away.
She was concerned about going to school.
“But Mommy,” she said to me. “If it doesn’t go away before I go to school then people won’t like me,” she said.
“People don’t like you because of what you look like on the outside,” I told her.
“They like you because you are nice?” she said.
“Yes,” I told her.
She knows. She gets it.
I think I’ve done a decent job teaching my kids how to treat other people.
What I worry about is teaching them how to talk to themselves when other people are complete douches to them.
That, and functioning through pain.
Because I don’t think you get very far without possessing those two traits.
The world is not always a kind and forgiving place.
That little boy who was shot down by Number 5?
That was a pretty good opportunity for his mom to teach him a lesson in talking to himself.
In developing that teflon coating that he is going to need to get through life.
In teaching him that what someone else says to him does not determine the quality of his character.
Because that is not the first time a girl will be mean to him.
And when some kid is a complete prick in middle school or high school or college or at work, that kid is going to need those skills.
You can’t control what other people are going to say to you.
But you can control how you react to the things they say.
It has taken me over 40 years to learn this skill.
And it’s nowhere near perfected.
So if I can teach my kids that,
if I can teach them not to engage,
if, at sixteen or even better, ten years old, they can walk away from any mean or ignorant comment knowing that they are totally awesome,
well,
then I’ll really feel like I’ve done my job.
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