Last night on Space, after Battelstar Gallactica (the best not-watched show on TV people, get to it before season four is over and you’ve missed the whole thing!) Prom Night 3 and 4 were on, in succession. I’ve seen the beginning of Prom Night, so I know that the Bad Girl is MaryLou and she died a nasty death during the high school prom. So now that she’s dead she keeps coming back to kill people and terrorize her old school. (Honey, let it go already.) It’s not scary, it’s sort of stupid, and it’s not particularly well done at all … I’m talking the first one, I didn’t bother to stay up for the other ones, and I didn’t even watch more than 45 minutes of the first one….anyway, it’s not a scary film but it reminds you that kids are mean and stupid.
On Friday the Big One came home from school with a birthday invitation. “No one is going to N-‘s birthday party Mumma. Not T, not G, not S or A or R are going, they all said. I think that’s horrible. N is a new student who just came to our school in the fall, and nobody wants to be his friend. He’s a nice boy. The only thing he does that I don’t like is he keeps wanting to be my boyfriend and I’m not ready for that! I want to go to his birthday party though, even if it’s just me and N and his sister.”
The Big One has a huge vocabulary when it comes to understanding and discussing complex emotional issues. Not that she uses large words, but she knows exactly what she wants to say, and she doesn’t waste time trying to explain it.
It bothers me a great deal that seven-year olds can decide that they don’t want to go to someone’s party and that they’ll be so vocal about it. Not just vocal, perhaps they won’t go and they will toss their invitations into the garbage and they’ll just ignore N, not because he’s a misfit, but just because they can. I think back to my seven-year old days, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to dare to make the kind of decisions these kids seem to be making. I suspect that they’re not quite so independent as they seem, however, and that more of them will end up going to the birthday party than it first appears. I really hope so.
In another dinner-time conversation, tonight’s in fact, Big One was asking about being an Alter Server at mass. Since she can’t do this until Grade Four it’s not a big deal right now, but she did ask Hub and I if we were ever Alter Servers. I explained that we didn’t live close to church, and if I had been a Server, then my mum would have had to take me, and my brother and two sisters (ranging in age from seven to one, if I had been nine) to mass early, and then sit through mass with the kiddies while I served. My dad wasn’t so into going to mass at the time. Hub just said no, I wasn’t a server.
Then I realized that when I was younger, it was Alter Boys, and that Alter Girls were not so much available, in fact, you might say they were a rare commodity. As such, it wouldn’t have been part of my repertoire, being an Alter Server, because girls didn’t do that.
My children could not understand a world where the women did not do whatever the men wanted did. Isn’t that fantastic? They actually couldn’t comprehend a world where women had babies, stayed home with babies, looked after the house, and didn’t go out of the house to work. I think that’s amazing.
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