Parenting realization # 4398

I mentioned a little while back that E will be starting preschool in January. Things are still going ahead for that and she got into our first choice which is really close. The only thing is now I’m starting to worry about her and how she’ll be when kids start being kids and one of them says, “I’m not playing with you today. I’m playing with so-and-so.”, and I’m not there to help her. I wasn’t at all worried about this a few months ago because E and her main group of friends all play together so well. Some of them have known each other since they were only a few months old and even though they do fight sometimes for the most part they all really click. Then we started to socialize with some of the mothers and kids from dance class. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a really good thing. Since moving to Victoria I have not made many friends because I’m pretty restricted on places to actually meet people and I think it is great for E to play with new kids. It’s just that there are two girls E’s age, Annie and Sara (not their real names) who we either visit or have over and those two girls seem to click better with each other than they do with E. E likes these girls and they like E and the times when it has just been one of them has been great, but when all three of them get together the other two tend to play with just each other, hold hands and at dance class Thursday I heard the dreaded, “I’m playing with Annie today, not you.” E did not react well to that and got upset, stormed off and came over to me. I calmly told her that maybe she could dance by someone else and that Sara still wants to be her friend, but she was also Annie’s friend, but I felt terrible for her. It’s not nice to be rejected at any age, you know? She never really came around as Sara pretty much kept up that attitude the whole class and E was still talking about it the next day. I expect things to only get worse with those two specific girls as well because they’ll be attending the same preschool on the same days come January and obviously they’ll become closer. For now we’re just going to feel it out as we go and if I think the friendship is doing more harm than good then we might have to start “phasing them out“. Now I’m just hoping I’ve never told them about this blog…guess I’ll find out soon enough if I have!

I know that I can’t be there to help her with these things all the time and I don’t want to; she needs to learn and grow. Still, it is a hard realization to know that E will, most likely, come home from school in tears now and again. To know that other kids will hurt her. Kids are cruel, that is just a fact. And teenage girls? Gawd. We all know how they can be. I don’t even want to think about boys, but it does help to think that she’ll be the heart breaker in that situation.

But this whole deal with kids actually growing up? Man it happens faster than I thought it would.