‘Girls rule, Boys drool’ is a long held tenet of the feminine mystique that I’ve often dispatched as mere bravado. As part of the ‘best version of myself’ movement I’m reexamining a lot of the things I’ve dismissed and some of the things I’ve held as absolute fact. This simple rhyme, once dismissed is something that popped up again for me recently as I’ve watched the behaviors of kids on my block over the last year. It can be said that girls do wield a great and terrible power. My boys have learned this lesson. Consider the example of my neighborhood. Here, I believe, Be Dragons… In the form of young girls.
It started with a birthday party. Perhaps we should even go a step backward to the curious case of the invites. We were working on a shoestring budget and with a hoard of friends that my eldest wished to invite, as well as the people we already know in our grown up lives and needed to invite, there was precious little room to accommodate the entire block. Choices had to be made. The wifey and I ran down the list of names and considered, Santa-like, which kids were naughty and nice. When it came time for final cuts, she and I both agreed to leave out one kid in particular. This boy came from a very difficult home and is the boy who you always see first thing in the morning sitting outside throwing rocks at garbage cans, because he has nothing better to do with his day. This boy who we shall call ‘Caden’ for the sake of identification purposes, wasn’t all bad. He is rough around the edges and desperately unloved. So, as a result, he gets into scuffles and struggles with people.
As a result, we didn’t invite him. That should’ve been the end of the story. Instead, my precocious and braggadocio five-year-old decided to go to the kid’s house, let him know a party was going down and that other block kids were invited when he most certainly was not. That is not, as I sometimes say, ‘a good look’. Dear ‘Caden’ didn’t retaliate in any way–yet. Instead he told his cousin (one of the 10+ people living in the house…), a pre-teen girl the boys had played with for months. She did the work for him. The cousin put the word out that the boys were persona non grata. Friendships started to dry up immediately. In fact, two kids invited to the party ‘forgot’ to come.
I suspected all this at first but learned over time that word had been sent that the boys didn’t like ‘Caden’ and as a result weren’t cool. These boys are quite cool (much to my surprise–I thought my kids were nerds like me), but on the block they were hardly the cool ones. This all came down to a single girl. She instantly hurt the standing of the boys and her power extends to this day. There are still kids who don’t play with my boys. Such is the power of Dragons…. or girls.
Some Thoughts:
1. Down five pounds. I can do this weight loss thing once I start getting serious about working on myself a little each day.