Why I Never Liked Girls

This morning, Emma and I were headed toward her school after we dropped off Andrew. I decided it was a good time to ask a few questions and feel out how the second grade is going for her.
Sometimes it's just a matter of asking the same question for several days in a row until it's phrased in the right way to elicit the response you were looking for. This one took me a couple of tries to get right.
Boy, did I find out.
It turns out that there are already exclusive, hurtful little cliques forming up. In the second grade. And one girl has been kind of forcing Emma to be in hers. This clique has the very second-grade name of The Cheetah Girls Club and is loosely based on the Disney girl band of the same name.
Now, let me say that I will not judge mothers who let their girls listen to insipid pop music. This is clean stuff, for the most part. I mean, c'mon. It's Disney, right? But one look at the website will probably tell you why my daughter is not and won't be a big fan. Lots of makeup and plastic hair. Shiny-and-animal-print, too-tight clothes. My daughter will have better things to do with her life than listen to over-produced girl-power songs.
Not that I have an opinion.
The truth is, I just don't like that culture. I'm a hippie, okay? I prefer for my kids to be who they are. To find role models in real life. To aspire to more than pop stardom. To be individuals that are proud of who they are and don't have to compromise in order to fit in.
But, woah. I did not expect to be making this speech to my daughter in the second grade.
There is a pledge that this little chick is forcing other girls to make in order to be in her club. I'm not really clear on what the pledge is, but it involves placing your hand over your heart.
And Emma doesn't want to say the pledge.

Which makes me really proud.

So proud I almost burst the buttons right off my cardigan in the car when she told me that's what the problem was. In fact, even though she really didn't want to make her other friends mad, she was bold enough to tell Miss Bossy Pants that she didn't want to do the pledge.
And Miss Bossy Pants grabbed Emma's hand and forced it over her heart. She bullied Emma into saying the freaking pledge! Can you believe it?
Oh man. I was really mad.
But I stayed calm and tried to give her some tools to stand up for herself. We practiced breaking her hand away from MBP's grip (I even asked her which hand she had to use in the pledge so we could practice with the correct hand). And we talked about what to do next if that wasn't enough. Namely, walking away. And finding some better girls to hang out with.
"What if she follows me and still tries to make me do it?"
Poor baby.
I told her that was the point at which she should ask the teacher to intervene. And I promised that we'd talk about it after school - that I'd ask her how it went. If our techniques didn't work and the teacher didn't help her, I'd go straight into her classroom and I'd talk to the teacher about it.
You need to be brave and try it honey, but Mom will always stick up for you when you need it.
Always.
End of story.
We talked about how great it is to be different from other girls. To not have to take a pledge to feel special. To know that she is beautiful and smart and incredibly talented and could make a club of her own if she wanted to. A club where nobody had to pledge and anybody who wanted to could be in it, as long as they were friendly. And that lots and lots of girls liked her and would want to be in any club she made because she was nice. And she thought maybe a cooking club would be a good one to start up. We named off names of several of her favorite friends who were not in the Cheetah Girls club.
Because even though it's a silly, second-grade concept of a club, it matters.
It will matter what she thinks of clubs when all the girls start wearing makeup.
It will matter what she thinks of fitting in when girls start to conform to our culture's standards to get attention from boys.

It matters because my deepest, most ardent hope is that my daughter will make it through adolescence a little less broken than all the other girls.

When I picked her up, I asked about it. It was kind of a non-deal. She did have to walk away, but nobody followed her today and she played with a different girl.
She walked away.
That's my girl!

So far, so good....

DAILY BLISS: My man is home! Woo Hoo!