"You're Ugly"

She's sitting on my lap, facing me as we rock. I pull my face close to hers, her big blue eyes filling my vision, my fingers wrapped up in her wet hair, one hand on her bare back. I'm crying, a little, which is really surprising me and upsetting me.

"Tell me more about Kathy and Patti," she asks.

Kathy and Patti used to bully me when I was a kid. They were the cool girls, and I wanted to be their friend, but they were cruel to me. "You're not our friend," they would taunt, spitting their words in my face. "You're ugly." I cried a lot, then. And I'm crying about it now, in this desperate context of trying to teach Munchkin ... something. Empathy? Kindness?

In the tub, she told Pynchon about how she and Queen Bee at daycare were playing a game where they told the other kids "You're ugly." Pynchon tried to talk with her about it, but she wasn't taking him seriously. A major tantrum and all around blowup ensued. It was in the aftermath of this that I found myself both comforting and being appalled by my naked, wet, puffy-eyed little girl, this kid with the streak of ... mischief? In her eyes. Listening to me tell her what it feels like to be told "You're ugly" by girls you want to be friends with. But what she hears, apparently, is a story of two girls she wants to know more about. "Tell me more about Kathy and Patti, do you have pictures of them?"

I have dropped entirely out of the narrative, thirty years later once more pushed aside by the Queen Bees who draw everything in to themselves.

It's insane. I'm crying and suddenly feeling rejected by my preschooler, the little girl who wraps herself around me in desperate, passionate love. It's not her job to prop up my quite fragile ego, but her schoolyard games terrify me.

I was a terribly smart little girl, with almost no sense at all how to relate to my peers. Not in a charmingly awkward way, but just awkward: I was shy and arrogant, needy and sarcastic, bossy but desperate to please. Munchkin is experimenting with her own social skills, and already seems to be a lot better at peer relations than I ever was. So she experiments on me, tonight, telling me that I'm not ugly, that I'm beautiful, but also that she doesn't have a hug or a kiss for me, turning her back on my look of hurt surprise.

When she was a squalling colicky baby, lying angry and flailing on her back for nearly 10 months without even sitting up on her own, I longed for these days. When she would be a person. When I could talk to her, teach her, engage and interact with her through language, socially.

It's harder than I thought, but this, I know, is the real work of parenting. We will both be doing some growing up in the years that are hurtling so fast towards us now.

"You're ugly," she tells one of her toys, just loud enough for her father to hear her say it, corners of her mouth turned up a little as she peeks sideways and up, through her eyelashes, to see who is listening.