MPT9--Eighth Grade--Cliques Part 2

This is the tenth in a series of 15 posts recounting my childhood. (To see parts 1 through 9, click the label "MPT" in my sidebar.) Today's topic is Eighth Grade. Last week I started talking about cliques and friendships and just generally the cruelty of tweens, here is part 2 of that saga.



My homeroom teacher in Eighth Grade was Mrs. Brady, an old woman who'd been teaching forever. A seasoned veteran and one smart lady, she taught social studies which was primarily civics that year. In fact, it was the year of the 200th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention (1787-1987), so we did a lot of stuff around that. Again, switched classes. I loved Mr. Monroe for English (or I guess we called that Language Arts); Mr. Goodspeed was the new science teacher, young and cute, all us girls had a crush on him and he went on to marry our 7th grade math teacher, Miss Hogan (yea, I remembered her name); I can't remember the name of my French teacher. We had an AWFUL new art teacher that year, Mr. Little, he should never have been allowed to teach--he hated kids.

Friendships

In 7th grade and entering 8th, my best friend was Liz. We would pass notes between classes. We were a foursome with Jina and Julie and we all had nicknames for each other. I was Frisbub, Liz was Caroline Squared (can't remember the nicknames for the other two).

Not long into the new school year, things got weird. I don't remember the exact turn of events. There was some weirdness at a Bar Mitzvah I think and then I talked to someone else, I think it was Kristen, about "hey, that was weird at the Bat Mitzvah" and she was like "I don't think Liz wants to be your friend anymore" and then somehow we set up a before-school meeting between me and Liz. Ugh, it was an ugly time but the gist of it was Liz didn't want to be my friend anymore, she wanted "space," whatever that means when you're in a 40-person class together.

That was soon followed by Jina breaking off her friendship with Julie.

Soon it became apparent what was going on: Julie and Liz were moving into the popular clique. (Apparently one could not do that and be my friend at the same time.) I don't know how these things work, but somehow it was established that the other clique, the other lunch table, was he popular one and we were, I don't know, unpopular, uncool? So the girls in my group tried to make their way into the popular group.

I won't say this wasn't painful, it was awful to lose these close friends and feel left out. But I was also smart enough to realize, hey, this is 8th grade, next year we are moving into an enormous high school (2700-students-enormous), all this clique baloney wasn't going to last, we weren't going to see many of these kids again and what clique you were in wasn't going to matter in a few short months. So I did not attempt to join the popular club.

Instead, I became an "outcast." I don't remember who named us that--did we name ourselves? Is this a name I called us at the time or only in hindsight? I think there were 5 of us after the dust settled. Me, Julie, Jenny, Naomi, but I can't remember who else. I'd have to pull out my yearbook and I'd rather not. Maybe there were only 4 of us. What confuses me now when I look back, I can see why the other girls were left behind--the tomboy, the black girl, the girl who spoke broken English. Why was I there? Certainly I was a nerd. I was the smartest girl in my class, wore glasses, was tall/skinny/flat-chested. Was that enough to qualify me for outcast status or was I just swimming against the stream and refusing to suck up to the popular kids? I don't know! I'd like to think we were just the strong ones who didn't care about popularity--and in a way we surely were, because we weren't kissing anyone's butts to belong. But with wisdom and age and a history degree, I've learned that the ones singled out for things like witch trials tend to not fit in with societal norms. What was my stigma? My scarlet letter?

So that was 8th grade. I hung with the outcasts, but I didn't totally disconnect from Jina and Liz either. And in the end, I was right--none of this baloney mattered when we entered high school the next year. We were a tiny feeder school into an enormous high school. I made new friends and left that drama behind.

But even though it didn't matter in the end, it still sucks. It sucks that we did this to each other, treated each other this way, cared about popularity rather than connection and friendship and bond. I hope that I've learned lessons that will help me help my children navigate these stormy waters when the time comes.

And so I don't leave you on this downer note, I'm happy to say I have reconnected with all my former besties, Jina, Liz and Julie, so it's all good. :-) (Yea for facebook!)

Next week we enter the high school years. Ooh fun. For more 8th grade stories, visit Mommy's Piggy Tales. See you next week!

Cards for Donya

My Blessed Life is organizing a birthday card drive for a sweet woman with Down Syndrome. Her name is Donya and she's turning 50 years old. :-) Please go read this post to learn more about making this an awesome birthday celebration!

I have a cousin who has Down Syndrome {he's 24 years old and doing awesome, he graduated from high school, has a job, helps with the high school football team, and he is just a joyful person and a blessing to everyone who knows him} so this is near and dear to my heart. I hope you'll consider sending Donya a card to mark this milestone birthday! Don't worry procrastinators, there's plenty of time--her birthday is August 18th.

Thanks! Have a great weekend!

MPT9--Seventh Grade--Cliques Part 1

This is the ninth in a series of 15 posts recounting my childhood. (To see parts 1 through 8, click the label "MPT" in my sidebar.) Today's topic is Seventh Grade. First off, I'm having a tough day. I forgot to defrost the chicken for the crockpot (I hope I can get it defrosted enough to have the crockpot started by noon); I was planning to go to Walmart but I realized (1) I forgot to defrost the chicken and (2) I don't have a full list written. T has been waking up super early and screaming bloody murder and this morning she's been super cranky so I just put her in her crib for a morning nap (she hasn't had one of those in a long time). She's crying now but hopefully she falls asleep. Either way, I have to scramble to write 7th and 8th grade today as we're going on vacation soon and 8th grade will have to auto-post....

All of this to say that I've decided to make 7th and 8th grade a 2-part series about friendship and cliques. I was inspired by several piggy tales last week that talked about the awkwardness and the fickleness of friends and cliques in the junior high years. And I have several stories on the subject.

Background

My 7th grade homeroom teacher was Mrs. Peters, another middle aged woman with grown children. Very kind, I liked her a lot. She also taught social studies and maybe English, I can't remember, oh and French, so I guess I had her for several subjects. 7th grade had its own hall in the 7th-8th grade wing of my 4th through 8th campus. We felt very grown-up switching classes. I had Mrs. Tritch for science, Miss {oh my gosh, I'm blanking on her name, it'll come to me} for math. What am I forgetting? P.E. (Mr. Berardi, now a Facebook friend), Art (Mrs. Felton, total hippie freak, taught us tai chi while waiting in line, very cool), Home Ec/Wood Shop/Computers (Mrs. Freesma), Music (Ms. Lundberg, a friend's mom, loved her!).

We did some short story writing in 7th grade. I wrote "The Man in the Wheelchair" as well as a story about a kid who couldn't get rid of his hiccups. I wrote the latter for a contest--we all had to write a story for this contest and I wrote this one about hiccups (not my best work!) and Mrs. Peters called me over and told me she couldn't submit that story because the character died. Yep, I couldn't figure out how to solve the character's hiccup problem, so he died. Oops. She asked if I'd mind submitting the Wheelchair story instead. That's what we did and I won a prize! Not first place or anything, more like honorable mention, but it was still really cool.

Friends

All these years, Kindergarten through 8th grade, I went to school with the same 40 kids (give or take--some would come, others would go, but about 35 of us stayed the same). There were some I was always close to (Julie) and some I was never really friends with (Amy), but in 6th and 7th grade, the cliques really started becoming more apparent and stark. The girls divided roughly in two, I specifically remember at this time starting to talk about the 2 lunch tables and knowing who sat where. So there were 2 cliques (I'm just talking about girls here), but there were roughly the same size and roughly, I don't know, equal. Some of the girls in the other clique had "boyfriends" so maybe they were "cooler" all along, but the "cool" thing was more of a big deal the next year.

Now, here come the painful memories, how we treated the less cool boys. I don't know if the boys had their own cliques or if this was as simple as who was cutest, but there definitely were (to us girls) the cool boys and the dorks/nerds.

Enter "7th Grade Social Dancing." This was an extracurricular activity, but everybody did it. It was at the school gym (once a week? once a month? don't remember). Teachers were brought in to teach us ballroom dancing--waltz, fox trot etc--presumably to teach us manners and social graces etc. Generally, I think I enjoyed it, but there were several awkward moments when we'd have to pair up. Thankfully, most of the evening our partners were assigned, but there would come the inevitable "boys choice" and "girls choice" dances and UGH, you didn't want a boy to think you liked him, you didn't want to be picked last, yadda yadda yadda. And I hate that I scurried to get with a cute boy and hated when I got stuck with a "nerd." I remember one time I got paired up with Seth, one of the "dorks," and at the next intermission I went over to my girlfriends and said how gross he was {I'm cringing as I write this, I'm so sorry Seth, I was an idiot!}, I wiped my hands on a napkin and to be all dramatic I waved the napkin and said "this is not a sanitary napkin" (which of course made us all laugh because I'd unwittingly referred to a feminine product, LOL)--as if he had cooties or something. Bad, bad, bad!

Oh how I wish I could go back and tell my 12-year-old self to like the uncool guys, to be kind to the outsiders. I could have been kind to Seth and Greg and whomever without it becoming a "boyfriend/girlfriend" thing. It would have been easier to just walk over to one of the less cool guys for partnering than to linger awkwardly. Oh the awkwardness!

By the way, I was taller than a lot of the boys. I know I was 5'5 at the end of 8th grade, not sure how tall I was in 7th, but a lot of the guys hadn't had their growth spurts yet. One day in social dancing, I was paired up with a shorter boy, Jordan, and as he had to spin me, I was so tall, his arm brushed against the clip in my hair (oh those fun '80s clips) and it fell out and embarrassed us both.

Meanwhile, one of the "nerds," Brian, liked me. We all knew he liked me, but I didn't "like" him. I liked him as a friend, he was a super nice guy and we'd been friends forever, but then he got a crush on me and I was cruel and I hate myself for how I treated him. (Nothing terrible, I just could've been so much nicer.) And of course it took till senior year of high school to realize it's about personality and not looks and we were in the same calculus class and then I started to "like" Brian but it was too late and he had figured out I wasn't so great after all.

For my part, I had a crush on this guy Cory for years. Literally, 5th through 10th grade, and he never gave me the time of day. I still dream about him occasionally (like this morning, I blame these piggy tales) and want him to like me. I wake up and I'm like "I'm 35 years old and happily married, why do I want this guy to like me??!!"

So anyway, that's part 1 of friends and awkwardness in junior high. Tune in next week when the real "fun" starts. And head over to Janna's for more 7th grade tales.

Blog Hop '10

I'm so excited to join this year's Blog Hop, hosted once again by Robin at Pensieve! I, of course, am not at BlogHer. I am sitting here in my little bedroom "office" while my kids watch {she says in horror} Barney in the other room. Thanks for stopping by my little corner of the web!!! Welcome!

I am "Eos Mom," {so-named because my 5-year-old son has Eosinophilic Esophagitis, more on that in a minute}. I live in Phoenix with my husband and 2 kids. My son "L" just turned 5 and my daughter "T" is almost 2. I'm a SAHM. If you want to read more about our everyday life, check out my "week in review" posts (that aren't really weekly, haha).

As I said, L has EE, which basically means if he eats foods he's allergic to, his esophagus erodes and bleeds. That made him very sick in his first year of life, but now he's outgrown several allergies and we just keep working on getting him to eat more foods. You can read more about that journey by clicking on my "ee" and "feeding" tabs.

Oh and both my kids are in speech therapy. You can read about L's apraxia or T's speech as well.

But mostly I like to blog about fun stuff, like movies. Hubby and I recently set up our tv so we can stream Netflix instantly so we watch a ton of movies and I like to review them here. I'll also tell you about the books I'm reading and tv shows I'm watching.

Thursdays, I'm blogging my youth with Mommy's Piggy Tales. This has been so much fun--to remember and write about my childhood and then read similar stories from other women. Today we'll be writing about 7th grade.

Fridays, I love the Five Question Friday meme. It's a chance for me to ramble on various fun topics. Love it!

And lately I've started sharing some "linky love" or favorite posts and recipes I've found around the blogosphere for Saturday Stumbles.

Thanks so much for stopping by! I hope you'll poke around a bit and see if you might want to visit again or {joy of joys} follow me. Be sure to leave me a comment so I can visit you in return. Now, I've got to wrangle the kids and get us all to Walmart. Happy Hopping!!!

Internet Hodgepodge--August 21

This is a multi-week edition of linky love because of my vacation. {I've decided to name these posts "internet hodgepodge" because they are always all over the place.} Check out more favorite posts over at It's Come to This.

Dear Gisele, have a sandwich and shut up. Amen to this post from stark.raving.mad.mommy.

A Pirate Adventure. Love love love this idea from Oh Amanda, I want to copy it down to every detail. L is very into pirates so this would be right up his alley. :-)

Morning sickness relief from the newly pregnant Momedy. {I do not ever plan to be pregnant again, but you know the saying "men plan and God laughs." So if the Lord gives me a surprise 3rd child, I will definitely want to remember this remedy.}

10 ideas for keeping kids busy while you cook from Saving Those Dollars.

I love this list of Micro-Indulgences for $4 or less from The Dabbler.


I really like this budgeting bulletin board system. I need to do this to track expenses without going to a cash system.


Homeschooling is not optional. I know others have linked to this already, but I just read it myself. This is my philosophy as well--whether or not you send your child to school every day, all parents must be (one of) their kids' teacher(s).

Such an easy and cute craft, great for gifts: washcloth cupcakes.

Alright, that's all I've got. {I'm so proud of myself for not waiting to the last minute this week!} Now go visit Mandi for more linky love!

Linky Love--July 30

Here's some of the good stuff I found this week:

I found these toddler french toast sticks from Once a Month Mom and couldn't wait to try them. I made them yesterday and both kids like them. Yea, and they're healthy too (at least more so than the Eggo waffles I typically serve)!

Feeding Four compiled two lists of ideas for playing with kids: pretend play and crafts. I need all the ideas I can get, because I'm not a "fun mom" often enough.

Oh Amanda gathered a great list of books. I'm always on the lookout for good reads!

I don't want to lose this recipe--these soft pretzels look so yummy and making them myself means no corn syrup and maybe (please, Lord) L will like them. (Oh and I got the link from Merry.)

This recipe for chocolate pound cake looks so good!

Head on over to It's Come to This to see what others stumbled on this week. :-)

Five Question Friday--July 30

It's Thursday night, woohoo, almost the weekend! It's time once again for 5QF hosted by Mama M. When I read the questions a few minutes ago I thought: I like this meme because it makes me think about random happy things, and I think I tend to have deep, dark thoughts much of the time. Why am I such a glass-half-empty person?! Anyway, on to the Q&A.....1. Did you have a favorite blanket or toy as a kid? If so, do you still have it?
My favorite toy was my Stacy doll that I wrote about here. Yes, I still have her, though I need to unearth her from the boxes in the garage so I can share her with my daughter. I also loved my first comforter. It was a yellow and white plaid and soooo soft. My parents kept it for a long time (after my decor changed when I was 8 or so), but I don't have it and they've probably gotten rid of it by now. I also loved my Green Giant sleeping bag, I don't have that either. ;-) Oh and I did keep a smaller blanket that I believe is hand-knit, from my grandmother but I don't think she did the knitting, that's always been a favorite.

2. Do you dream in color?
I have dreamt in both black and white and color, but I'd say color is my norm.

3. How tall are you? Do you wish you were shorter or taller?
I am 5'7. When I was a kid and we'd always watch beauty pageants, it seemed like all the contestants were 5'7 so I announced I wanted to be 5'7. {I believe these days contestants tend to be taller than that, tho' I haven't watched one in years. Because I don't support the objectification of women. 'Nuff said.} But by the time I grew to be 5'7, I had realized that boys don't like to date taller girls--and it always seemed like I liked the cute short boys. Anyway, while I've often disliked my height, now that I've put on weight since having two kids, I realize that having a tall frame helps me elongate the fat, so that's good right? And my husband is 6', so the whole short boy thing didn't turn out to be a problem. :-)

4. If you could have anyone's (celeb or other) voice as the guide on your GPS, who would it be?
Ooh, James Earl Jones. That's be pretty stinkin' cool.


5. Do you return your shopping cart to the corral or leave it wherever in the parking lot?
Since having kids, I try to return it to the corral when I'm able, because I know that sometimes it's just not possible and I just have to leave it wherever. Also, I generally like to park near the cart return--so I can grab a cart on the way in (if I want to put my daughter in it) and leave it on the way out. But again, that's not always possible. So I do my best.


For more Q&As, visit Mama M's place. Have a great weekend!