what Lily is up to (at Nancy's indirect request)

One night last week I was working in my basement office (on my dissertation—what else?) and Lily and T were upstairs. Lily came down to my office and said, “Mom, I need to tell you something.” She had an urgent tone in her voice, so I turned around and pulled her up onto my lap and asked her what she needed to tell me. “Sometimes,” she said, “When you’re working down here in your office and Dad and I are upstairs, I feel like I don’t have a mom. I feel like I have a dad but no mom.” Uuuuuhgh. Time to finish this damn dissertation.



Having an extremely articulate four-year old is quite an experience. After a temper tantrum or outburst, she can almost always articulately explain to T and me what she was upset about. She uses words like “apparently” and “particularly” (and today she added “miscellaneous” to her vocabulary) to add nuance to her explanations (and arguments).



In another Lily-related development, two girls at her school—I’ll call them Bullyana and Meanarina—seem to be picking on her lately and I’m not sure what is the best way to handle it. Bullyana gave Lily a little trouble last year, telling Lily two or three times that Lily was ugly or stupid. Bullyana tends to interrupt the other kids a lot, pushes and hits, and when I spent the day at Lily’s school once last year, I saw Bullyana putting sand and gravel on the other kids’ heads. None of the teachers or assistants seemed to notice, so I told Bullyana to stop and she looked me right in the eye and said, “I wasn’t doing anything.”



This year, Bullyana and Meanarina are always together and they seem to be trying to intimidate Lily. Lily has a fair share of alpha-girl in her and is not easily intimidated, so I imagine that accounts for the new tactics Bullyana and Meanarina resorted to on Thursday. Lily came home from school with a section of her hair woven into a tight, intricately knotted clump, and a two-inch long scratch on her stomach. At first she didn’t want to talk about the clump in her hair or the scratch on her stomach, but finally the story came out. Bullyana had knotted her hair and Meanarina had poked her in the stomach with a pencil—so hard that it left a two-inch scratch that looked like a cat scratch. Where the teachers and assistants were during this incident I don’t know.



Lily is a smart cookie. After T and I explained what a clique was, she immediately identified Bullyana and Meanarina as a clique and she said that she didn’t want to be a part of that clique. We talked about how cliques try to make kids who aren’t part of the clique feel bad about themselves, and Lily said, “Next time they bother me, I’ll tell them I don’t feel bad about myself and they should leave me alone. They should respect my body,” and then she added—and this made me so proud—that if she saw Bullyana and Meanarina giving any of the other kids a hard time, she would say, “Hey, leave them alone! Respect their body! Don’t try to make her feel bad about herself!”

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