Bounce Back

My daughter's resiliency is truly awesome. To wit: Yes, not only did she hear what T said yesterday, she was the one who told me the story, with her friend J throwing in her "Yeah, and it wasn't nice!" here and there as she went along. Apparently they had gone back outside afterwards, and Em had told T off...or, rather, told him that he'd hurt her feelings. He'd responded in typical 11-year-old-boy fashion: "I was just kidding!" As if that makes it all better.

Thing is, it actually didn't take much more than that to make it all better. All Em seemed to really need was to vent to me and say things like, "Can you believe him?" and "Isn't that just so RUDE?" and to hear me say things like, "Does it really matter what a silly boy says?" and "You know your body and what is and isn't true about it. So forget him." Within minutes she was back to putting on her little skit for me and my aunt, all bubbly and animated and excited. And she and J spent about half the day today playing with T and his brother, even having a picnic lunch with them on T's front lawn. She truly did just shake it off.

That's just the way Em is, really. Tonight, for instance, she went to a bowling party, and was hanging out with two of her friends from Hebrew School, when they decided that a boy who was bowling with them was really cute. That is just not Em's thing as yet, so she went on her merry way, but one of the other girls apparently started ignoring Em in favor of ogling this boy. When I came to pick her up, Em was obviously, visibly unhappy. I made her and her friend talk it out a bit, and there were a lot of tears from Em, whose feelings were truly hurt by being ignored and left out by a friend. On the way home, I talked to her a bit about how this was something she was going to come upon in her life--girlfriends who would drop her like a hot potato every time some guy came along--and how this was another one of those things she would have to use to decide who is worth spending a lot of 'friendship energy' on, and who simply isn't reliable and worth having as a really close friend. By the time we got home--not 15 minutes later, and with the tears still wet on her cheeks--she was giggling about it, and walked into the house to announce--grinning, mind you--to her dad, "Guess what? I had a first tonight! It was the first time one of my friends dumped me for a boy!"

All I can say is that I should only be that resilient. That kid makes me so freaking proud.