Aliens vs Teenagers

Yesterday morning, Duchess started weeping* about something that happened at recess yesterday. Apparently, many of her classmates have been playing a game Duchess invented, called "Aliens from Andromeda,"** for about a week at recesses. They often play fairly baroque games, with weird wrinkles to accommodate various kids' preferences - one kid has been pretending to be an alien robot dog. Yesterday, though, some of the girls who are increasingly being identified as The Popular Girls decided they're tired of Aliens, and started playing "Teenagers," instead.

This is what Duchess said, almost verbatim, through her tears: "I don't want to play teenager, and I think it's STUPID to play teenager because we're all going to BE teenagers, and I think we should be KIDS while we still CAN be kids!"

I said, because I'm very sensitive and generous and never make negative generalizations, "Also, teenagers suck."

There's a lot going on here - Duchess is beginning to feel worried about her social situation, and she's anticipating adolescence with excitement and anxiety. She's friends with everybody, and best friends with nobody, so she sometimes finds herself feeling isolated when the cliques harden up. She's also seeing that these girls are being identified as The Pretty Girls ("And they're not even the prettiest, Mom!") and she's torn between wanting to be pretty and popular, and feeling like it's stupid to want to be a teenager, or to care about being pretty and popular. Middle school is looming.



*This is not necessarily a sign of sincere distress, as Duchess tends to plunge deeply into her emotional responses to almost everything, no matter how trivial. Also, she has a nasty cold, which is making her even more volatile.
**We watched a Monty Python episode a few weeks ago. Now Duchess knows what a "blancmange" is.

Comments

tiffky doofky said…
Oh my goodness, I just felt a sympathetic clutch in my stomach muscles.

Popular Posts