Mother in Law: Friendship dramas

It was always going to happen, I suppose. You can’t have two daughters without a fair share of friendship dramas. Deceptively Angelic Child no.1, though, seems to have more than most and it all kicked off again recently. 

Girls are so complicated. My husband now permanently looks like that gif where the confused woman has all the maths formulae floating around her. I admit it is hard to keep up with it all, particularly when you’ve done a day at work (in my case) dealing with other people’s problems. In fact, there was a time when I used to experience this stuff myself actually at work, and my husband had to try to understand it all when I got home. In my experience, it is rare for men to encounter such problems, to notice such problems if they are encountered, or to care.

On this occasion, DALC1 was ditched by her two closest friends. It was pretty awful. She sobbed in my arms as if her heart was broken, which I guess it was really. What can we learn from DALC1?

She immediately went into survival mode and made some new friends. This involved her literally asking some girls if she could sit with them the next lunchtime. DALC1 has always been the child who feels a great deal of fear and 'does it anyway' and I was so proud of her for putting herself out there. Let’s not forget that these are teenage girls and they could quite easily have said no if they didn’t like the cut of her jib. I don’t suppose that would have been the phrase they would have used but you know what I mean. As well as being brave she had to be pretty humble to admit she didn’t have any friends. I don’t want much more in life than for her to be brave and humble.

Secondly, her spidey senses saw the red flags. There were about half a dozen small things that didn’t sit right with DALC1. One break time, she couldn’t find these two girls and suspected they had hidden from her. As teenagers you would think they were more mature than this but apparently not. Time and again with DALC1 I have learned to trust her and not trivialise these things when she tells us about them. They usually do tell you about these red flags, these things that made their tummy feel a bit funny, and it is really easy to brush them off - either because you are tired or they don’t seem important. Kids are really perceptive and we need to hone those skills, not encourage them to ignore their intuition. Noticing red flags comes in handy in life. In dating, of course, and even with your clients. We should all be listening to our gut.

As Megan Moroney sings, what doesn’t kill you calls you six months later, and sure enough the main culprit tried to make up with DALC1 last week. This time even my husband could see the red flags - they were the size of bedsheets on telegraph poles. We could see DALC1 wavering and wanted to stop her engaging. She, quite rightly, told us it wasn’t our decision: we just had to be there if it all went wrong again. But, she went upstairs to think about it and decided she wasn’t about to jump back in after all. You don’t get to mess her about twice. Bravo.

What DALC1 does need to learn, though, is that you can be civil to people you don’t like. It took me a long time to learn this and it was probably only when I entered the workplace that I realised how important it is. It is perfectly fine to keep some thoughts to yourself and muddle your way through life without ejecting certain people from it.

The most important thing for me, though, is that DALC1 continues to have an element of vulnerability about her. She would be justified in being as hard as nails by now, and never trust anyone ever again, but I don’t want that for her. I want her to continue to feel the excitement of throwing herself into things, to try things, to win some and lose some, and remain humble and brave.

Next stop, presumably, is boys.

Some facts and identities have been altered in the above article