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Entry tags:
hard reading
Having the car at my disposal for a doctor's appointment today, I took advantage of some opportunities and picked up things I'd been wanting. One of those came from a recommendation somewhere here online: the book Queen Bees & Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman. I saw an interesting comment in passing that this book is useful to women without daughters of the relevant age group because it can help us explain to ourselves some of our adult problems with other women.
Okay, good luck parsing that one; what I initially read was phrased better, but I've lost track of where I saw it.
Anyway, I've generally tended to make friends with male peers more easily than female ones, and the same for keeping the friendship once it formed. That's a little odd given that my only actual long-term friendship throughout my childhood was with my sister; but I can remember having a female friend during the years that I was in kindergarten and first grade, and I can remember having an almost-friend in fourth grade who was female, and at the end of 7th grade I was thrown a goodbye party by Gretchen and Naomi and Stacey that made me realize I could've had a genuine friendship with them if circumstances had been a bit different ... but even then, I trusted the guy "friendly acquaintances" a lot more easily.
And my innate distrust of female peers shot WAY through the stratosphere somewhere around the middle of eighth grade through the middle of tenth. By my senior year, I found one girl I trusted enough to even sit next to her in a couple of classes, and a hefty chunk of THAT was because she was equally outcast by the others, and equally comfortable making herself even less popular by calling them out on their nonsense directly and in front of witnesses.
So, here I am, well into the 35-44 age bracket, and I've got one physical-world female friend. Well, in a lot of ways, to be utterly fair to her, I think we wound up being friends because she was already fairly good friends with the husbands; if they hadn't thought so highly of her, I never would've given her a second look, purely because I don't look at women as potential friends until (surprise!) I look around and realize she already is my friend. Am I sexist? Narcissistic? Why don't I make an effort to start up a friendship with the women in a given room? I don't seem to care about gender online, so what gives?
Skimming through the introductory chapter of this book while the computer does its thing, I hit the following segment:
I'm the one who always moved away, so it can't be that.
My parents weren't abusive, in fact they were supportive and reliable even when mystified, so it can't be that.
I wonder if it was the teachers.
We all like to talk about the teachers who went the extra mile for us. (Carl Preske, who I think is now retired in Granby, NY, you were awesome!) We occasionally talk about the teachers who were especially terrible. We don't tend to even think about the teachers who just, y'know, didn't care. They were there to do a job, and a hard job at that, and when they'd given their lectures and finished their paperwork and set up their next situations, their involvement ended.
From wonderful teachers to terrible teachers, as a student I took for granted that they were supposed to want to help me learn. And starting in seventh grade, I had a series of teachers for various topics that really didn't care if I was even present, except as it impacted their workload. There was the English teacher who cried and wailed at us because we couldn't be trusted alone in the room while the sad parts of Where the Red Fern Grows were read aloud. There was the homeroom teacher who talked over me and then turned his back when I told him my locker wouldn't open no matter how carefully I followed his instructions. There was the Biology teacher who got mad at me for pointing out that he gave my lab partner a worse grade for the same notes and the same results, and the only difference between us was that I was the class nerd girl and my lab partner was a big guy used to being told he was dumb. (Hell, the lab partner's handwriting was more legible than mine.) I had an American History teacher who thought the state of Maine was south of the state of New York, a Chemistry teacher who was annoyed that I was reteaching his lessons to half the class during study periods because they didn't understand the way he'd phrased it, an English teacher who split his time between yelling at the entire class and making fun of individual grammar mistakes, and a math teacher who tried to flunk me out of his advanced class during the first quarter in order to prove a point to another teacher in the same department.
You'd think I'd have a problem with authority figures, not women.
Oh, granted, the cheerleaders were the school bullies in high school, there was a Mean Girl in ninth grade Chorus who thought the way to make other people like her was to openly mock some other victim, and the smartest girl in eighth grade decided the entire class was going to "play a prank" on me by loudly pestering the shyest boy to ask me on a date, and then cackle before he could say anything. I couldn't figure the logic out on that one, regarding me OR him as victims. I wasn't hurt by these brats, I certainly didn't wish they'd be my friends, I just wished they would shut up for the rest of the school year.
I don't get it. Hopefully the rest of the book will help me figure out why that one passage hit me so hard.
Okay, good luck parsing that one; what I initially read was phrased better, but I've lost track of where I saw it.
Anyway, I've generally tended to make friends with male peers more easily than female ones, and the same for keeping the friendship once it formed. That's a little odd given that my only actual long-term friendship throughout my childhood was with my sister; but I can remember having a female friend during the years that I was in kindergarten and first grade, and I can remember having an almost-friend in fourth grade who was female, and at the end of 7th grade I was thrown a goodbye party by Gretchen and Naomi and Stacey that made me realize I could've had a genuine friendship with them if circumstances had been a bit different ... but even then, I trusted the guy "friendly acquaintances" a lot more easily.
And my innate distrust of female peers shot WAY through the stratosphere somewhere around the middle of eighth grade through the middle of tenth. By my senior year, I found one girl I trusted enough to even sit next to her in a couple of classes, and a hefty chunk of THAT was because she was equally outcast by the others, and equally comfortable making herself even less popular by calling them out on their nonsense directly and in front of witnesses.
So, here I am, well into the 35-44 age bracket, and I've got one physical-world female friend. Well, in a lot of ways, to be utterly fair to her, I think we wound up being friends because she was already fairly good friends with the husbands; if they hadn't thought so highly of her, I never would've given her a second look, purely because I don't look at women as potential friends until (surprise!) I look around and realize she already is my friend. Am I sexist? Narcissistic? Why don't I make an effort to start up a friendship with the women in a given room? I don't seem to care about gender online, so what gives?
Skimming through the introductory chapter of this book while the computer does its thing, I hit the following segment:
I believed I didn't have the right to complain when people who were supposed to care about me treated me badly. I had already learned it was more important to have the relationship than how I was treated within it.
- QB&W 2nd Edition, Wiseman, pp. 15-16
I had to put the book down and stare at the wall for a while.- QB&W 2nd Edition, Wiseman, pp. 15-16
I'm the one who always moved away, so it can't be that.
My parents weren't abusive, in fact they were supportive and reliable even when mystified, so it can't be that.
I wonder if it was the teachers.
We all like to talk about the teachers who went the extra mile for us. (Carl Preske, who I think is now retired in Granby, NY, you were awesome!) We occasionally talk about the teachers who were especially terrible. We don't tend to even think about the teachers who just, y'know, didn't care. They were there to do a job, and a hard job at that, and when they'd given their lectures and finished their paperwork and set up their next situations, their involvement ended.
From wonderful teachers to terrible teachers, as a student I took for granted that they were supposed to want to help me learn. And starting in seventh grade, I had a series of teachers for various topics that really didn't care if I was even present, except as it impacted their workload. There was the English teacher who cried and wailed at us because we couldn't be trusted alone in the room while the sad parts of Where the Red Fern Grows were read aloud. There was the homeroom teacher who talked over me and then turned his back when I told him my locker wouldn't open no matter how carefully I followed his instructions. There was the Biology teacher who got mad at me for pointing out that he gave my lab partner a worse grade for the same notes and the same results, and the only difference between us was that I was the class nerd girl and my lab partner was a big guy used to being told he was dumb. (Hell, the lab partner's handwriting was more legible than mine.) I had an American History teacher who thought the state of Maine was south of the state of New York, a Chemistry teacher who was annoyed that I was reteaching his lessons to half the class during study periods because they didn't understand the way he'd phrased it, an English teacher who split his time between yelling at the entire class and making fun of individual grammar mistakes, and a math teacher who tried to flunk me out of his advanced class during the first quarter in order to prove a point to another teacher in the same department.
You'd think I'd have a problem with authority figures, not women.
Oh, granted, the cheerleaders were the school bullies in high school, there was a Mean Girl in ninth grade Chorus who thought the way to make other people like her was to openly mock some other victim, and the smartest girl in eighth grade decided the entire class was going to "play a prank" on me by loudly pestering the shyest boy to ask me on a date, and then cackle before he could say anything. I couldn't figure the logic out on that one, regarding me OR him as victims. I wasn't hurt by these brats, I certainly didn't wish they'd be my friends, I just wished they would shut up for the rest of the school year.
I don't get it. Hopefully the rest of the book will help me figure out why that one passage hit me so hard.