The apple and the tree.
Last weekend, Fiona attended a birthday party. She came home from school a few weeks ago with the invitation, all bubbly with excitement.
“Mum, mum!! Some of the boys were taking my blocks when it was my turn and I was sad about that but then one of the other boys said he was going to invite me to his birthday party and I just forgot to be sad! And he gave me a in-ba-tation!”
On Saturday morning (after the nail polish fiasco), she picked out a party outfit (yellow and gray striped dress, sparkly purple tights), we made a (last minute, of course) trip to store to pick out a present, then headed to the party.
Her friend’s mom opened the door, and said, “This must be Fiona!” As Fiona took off her coat and boots, I heard the birthday boy’s older brother say mockingly, “your girlfriend’s here.” The mom looked back at me and said, “Um, Fiona is the only girl coming today. Hope that’s okay.”
Okay? *celebratory fist pump!* That’s mah girl!
Not because I think a boy’s birthday party is better than a girl’s. I love girl parties. Hell, our life is a girl party. Not because Fiona has a “boyfriend”. (Which I am quite sure she does not. She had a crush on a boy in preschool and we never. stopped. hearing about him. This is not like that at all.)
It’s because my girl is just so much like me.
My birthday party, in maybe 2nd or 3rd grade or so? Me and my sister and whole buncha boys.
Look at Heather, bangs all straight and smiling nicely. And then there’s me, hair all askance, making a face with a hot dog hanging out of my mouth. Typical.
And I’m glad to see that she’s making friends at school, and not just getting invites to the parties where either everyone, or every girl, is invited.
In preschool, Finn was in a very small class. There wasn’t much boy/girl separation. But now, with kindergarten- and it’s a funny thing, kindergarten. You send this little kid off for hours, and the only way to know what happens during those hours is to rely on these little snippets of info that said kid gives you. In kindergarten, she’s come home with stories about how “only boys can do experiments“. She’s told me the boys have told her she can’t play with the blocks. My favorite, though, was the time she came home and relayed a story about something that had happened at snack time. Apparently as the kids were choosing places to sit, Fiona decided to sit with some of her friends, who happened to be boys. She was informed that that was the boys table, and she should go sit at the girls table. She wasn’t entirely clear on whether this info was given to her by the boys or by the girls, but she was clear about how she dealt with it.
When I asked what she said when she was told not to sit at that table, she told me, “I brang the truth, Mama. They said that girls have to sit only at the girls’ table and only boys at the boys’ table. But I brang the truth because there is no boys’ or girls’ table, you can sit anywhere you want to.”
On Saturday afternoon when I returned to pick up my little lady, the friend’s mom told me that “she did just fine, with all the boys.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “She can hold her own.”
