I had a bizarre encounter with another mother at M’s baseball game today.
To contextualize: as I think I have mentioned before, Fort Wayne in general and IPFW in particular have an overly nice, overly polite culture–to the point where genuine, valid disagreements are squelched due to fear of conflict. This trait is especially true among women here. I think women anywhere are socialized to be “nice” and “agreeable” more than men, to play the peacemaker and maintain a whole “go along to get along” mentality. But this mentality is especially true among women, and to some extent men, in Fort Wayne and at my university. I have seen firsthand on too many occasions men and women back down on a matter of great importance, and the reason why is pretty much always the same: nobody wants to make waves or “cause trouble.”
As is probably obvious from what I’ve written over the years, I am not a “go along to get along” kind of gal. I think I am a nice person, and I do not think I am abrasive. However, I am not a doormat, which sometimes leads some folks to dislike me (shrug). I will not allow myself–or people I care about–to be mistreated or bullied, if those situations can be avoided. If that is read as abrasiveness, then there is nothing I am willing to do to change that perception.
I have also stressed to M that she has to advocate for herself, because she can’t assume that anyone else will, and that she should not allow others to bulldoze their way through her life. This has been difficult, because M wants everybody to like her; because she is so young, she has not yet figured out all of the dangers, let alone the impossibility, to that approach to life. She is learning, however.
Now, here’s where the baseball game comes in. As the other team ran off the field prior to the last inning, another kid said in a mocking, sing-song voice, “We’re gonna win-in! We’re gonna win-in!” to M as M ran onto the field with her team. M turned to her with a withering look and said in an annoyed tone of voice, “You don’t know who is going to win because the game is tied. Our team could win, or your team could win.” Then M trotted off onto the field.
I chuckled to myself when I heard this exchange. M has too often been unable to respond to kids who have made mean remarks or treated her badly, but she has made great strides in the past six months or so. I saw this moment as evidence of that progress. While I did plan on talking to her afterwards to tell her that sometimes it’s OK to let things like this go and simply ignore the other kid–especially since this kid wasn’t saying anything deliberately mean or personal to M–I wasn’t troubled by M’s response. Both girls just had the competitive juices flowing.
Clearly, though, this was not the case for the mother sitting next to me, whose child is a teammate of M’s and thus is not the mother of the child M “talked back” to. She looked over at me and said, “Wow! She’s a competitive little thing, isn’t she?” I responded that yes, M can be somewhat competitive. I also added that, like most people, she doesn’t appreciate it when kids give her wrong information when she knows she is right. I gave the example of kids at school who tell her that her math answer is wrong when M knows she is right. I explained that behavior bothers her, which is probably why this little girl’s comment got to her.
Then the mother said to me, “So you’re going to work with her on that, right?”
I was dumbfounded by the comment. What is there to “work on”? That M wants to win? That she doesn’t want to listen to somebody talk smack to her? That she doesn’t like being told she’s wrong by people who don’t know what they’re talking about? I’m sure my face showed the confusion I was feeling. I repeated that I don’t think anybody likes being told that they’re wrong when they’re actually right and added that I didn’t see that as a trait that needed to be worked on.
The other woman then made some comment about how “this will make it really tough for her in middle school”–whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean–and then asked if M was an only child! I responded, no, she’s the oldest, at which point she misunderstood and said, “Oh, so she’s the youngest! That explains it!”, as if being a youngest child is a fatal character flaw (and again, what is there to explain?!). I again said, “No, she is the oldest. She does well in school, and we’re proud of her.” I then returned to my book, making it clear that the conversation was over.
I was–and still am–angered by the many implications of this incident. First, it irritates to me to no end that the little bit of competitive spirit M showed, as well as her refutation of another child’s “smack talk,” is something that allegedly needs to be “worked on” and eliminated. If she were a boy, I can guarantee you this other parent never would have said one word about M’s comment; instead, she would have been praised for her competitive instinct. But since she’s a girl, she’s just supposed to “be nice” and not want to win or talk back to someone who spoke to her in a disrespectful way.
Second, the implication that being an only or youngest child explains her perceived bad behavior also infuriates me. I was the youngest in my birth family, and because my siblings were all so much older than me, I lived almost half of my childhood as an only child. I have many friends who were only children. I am so sick and tired of the insulting comments these friends and I receive about our birth order status–as if we are these entitled, spoiled brats who behave badly. I earned the highest grades and got in the least trouble of any of my siblings. The only children I grew up with tended to be compliant children who were admirably close with their parents, and as adults, the only children I know are almost all very high achievers. Many of the colleagues I’ve had over the years were only children. That is why it irritated me to hear this woman accuse M of being an only or youngest child as if it were a bad thing.
While there is much I love about Fort Wayne, this mentality that people, and especially women, should tolerate all sorts of bad behavior in order to “be nice” drives me up the wall. It’s depressing that in this allegedly “post-feminist” era (HA!), girls are still supposed to act like doormats. Ugh.
Rebecca West wrote in 1913, “I have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.” Both M and I are feminists, because–among other reasons–we have no interest in being doormats.
Kind of sad how these sexist attitudes linger on, even almost 100 years after that West quote.
