Odd Girl Out

by Rachel Simmons

  When I entered the restaurant, Melissa was holding an armful of shopping bags and standing by the bar. She was about my age, with shiny, curly black hair, narrow shoulders, and a broad, pleasant smile. Barbara, who stood just behind her daughter, was stout and middle-aged, with long, curly salt-and-pepper hair. Both greeted me warmly, though as we were seated I noticed Barbara studying the menu intently.

  After diet Cokes and salads were ordered, Melissa began.

  "I have to admit that popularity was very important to me," she said, as though she were getting some shameful fact out of the way, confession-style. "I think I was always in the popular group. From the outside, people thought I was great friends with this group. I was always—always—thought of as being with that group." The reality, she was quick to add, was different.

  Camille had always been her closest friend. She lived in the neighborhood, which made it easy for the girls to carpool to the many afterschool activities they shared. There was swimming, gymnastics, ballet, soccer, Hebrew school. Even when there was nothing to do, Melissa hung out at Camille's house after school.

  Camille was cute and magnetic. She seemed to fill the rooms she entered, and though that meant lots of girls to play with, Melissa could not help but feel small in Camille's shadow. She was plagued by the constant hum of being too big, too homely, too uncool. Whenever Melissa liked a boy, the boy liked Camille. When Camille got around guys, she acted stupid and silly and ignored Melissa. At Hebrew school, Camille ditched Melissa if a more popular girl from another school was around. Melissa was often jealous and ashamed.

  Camille was best friends with Nicola, who lived across the street, and whenever the two of them got together, they started to lie. They would pretend not to have plans, so that when Melissa asked Camille what she was doing that day, the answer would always be some variation on "Oh, I don't know what I'm doing yet." Undeterred, Melissa called Camille constantly. One time, riding her bike past Camille's house, she saw the two of them chalking the driveway. "Oh, we just got together!" Camille insisted. "We never knew you wanted to come over." Camille made you feel, Melissa told me, "like she would do these obnoxious, mean things so slyly that you couldn't really call her on it."

  In seventh grade, Melissa's class was divided, and she was separated from all of her friends except Camille and Nicola. The shift would permanently alter the social chemistry. By October, the two girls had turned on her.

  "They basically dropped me as a friend but very slyly," Melissa said, stirring her soda. "They would just not invite me. I was not invited to hang out after school, never included in plans. They were horrible. They made my life hell."

  But the illusion of their friendship persisted, and so did Melissa. Only a sharp eye would have seen the truth. "Camille's instinct was to be nice to everyone and to never say a mean thing. She would just be very elusive, very sly." So Melissa still ate lunch with them, even though nobody talked to her. She would go to the bathroom with them, even though one time Camille whirled around and snapped, "Melissa, do you ever stop following us?" She would see them together at the movies and want to disappear under the seats.

  "I was very social, very outgoing. It was traumatic. I would go home crying every night. But on the other hand, I felt compelled to be part of that group," Melissa remembered.

  As she lingered among the girls who mostly ignored her, she recalled, "I got very good at listening to conversations. I remember spying, anything I could do to understand. I walked behind them to hear what they were saying. I got good at investigating."

  "Um," Barbara said, clearing her throat. I looked over, for a moment having nearly forgotten she was there. She had been twisting her cocktail napkin into small pieces underneath her tall soda glass, staring at stringy lemon pulp floating near the bottom. Her face seemed frozen.

  "Uh, I have to be honest," she said, eyes still downcast. "I encouraged Melissa to be friendly with Camille. I thought, you know, that it would be nice to have a Jewish girl to hang around with."

  Melissa gave her mother a quick "that's nice" look. "I remember walking home by myself a lot. I felt very, very lonely. I felt insecure. I felt ugly. Disgusting. Depressed. I'd lay on my bed, thinking these awful thoughts, that people wouldn't even care if..." She trailed off.

  "I thought I must be awful to have my friends hate me," she continued, shaking her head. "I must be pathetic. I don't have anything good to say. They think I'm annoying. I was the most annoying person this year. Everything you could think negative about yourself, I thought."

  "You handled it very well," Barbara said. "When you talk about it, it makes me want to cry." And before I could move my head to see Melissa's reaction, Barbara was up and around the table, holding her sobbing daughter. Barbara's face was wet.

  "I'm fine," Melissa sniffled, raising her palm slightly off the table. "I'm very in touch with my feelings. I have to say that the experience really made me such a better person. I learned such a lesson. I really learned what I'm looking for.

  "I think it was just that having friends that were part of this cool group was the most important thing. I would have done anything, to some degree, to be friends with them. I don't know why."

  Barbara returned to her seat. Our food had arrived and Melissa was wiping her eyes. I waited. I tried to seem casual. I did not want Melissa to feel embarrassed. Then Barbara exhaled loudly, half sigh, half raspy cough. This time, when she spoke, she looked straight at me. "When Melissa talks about this, it's very painful for me. I think I'm a little shut down on it. I can't really feel my feelings." She paused as the white noise of the restaurant rose in the background. "Because I feel I perpetrated this."

  Barbara grew up an overweight child with few friends. She received the lion's share of girls' meanness. Even the memory of her large body hulking against a backdrop of delicate girls still made her cringe. She looked mournfully at her daughter. "I didn't want Melissa to know that pain." When Melissa was born, Barbara became determined that she would be popular. When Melissa was old enough, Barbara told me, "I encouraged her to be friendly with the kids in the neighborhood." She paused. "I pushed her toward these people."

  I asked the inevitable, awkward question. Did she know what Melissa was going through?

  "Yes," she said. I saw Melissa's head whip around to her mother. "I felt so inadequate as a person." Barbara's eyes were shining. "I felt so ugly and obese. When I had a child, it brought out all my old fears and insecurities. I had to keep saying, Melissa is not me. Melissa is not me. It brought back memories of my own childhood. And I did not want her to know my pain. I wanted her to be happy. I wanted her to be popular."

  Barbara had met Camille's mother, Iris, at the community pool when their girls were young. With four attractive children, Iris exuded the easygoing confidence Barbara had always longed for. And yet, Barbara remembered, "Iris could also be very manipulative." But Barbara was in awe of how this woman managed to raise several well-adjusted children, and she wanted a piece of it. "If Melissa could hang out with Camille, then she'd have a good influence on Melissa," she reasoned. "Of course, Melissa didn't really need anyone to have a good influence on her."

  I persisted. "Did you ever mention to Iris how Camille was treating Melissa?"

  "I did try to talk to her," Barbara murmured. "I think that Iris could be very nice and yet then she could maybe talk behind your back." After a moment, she added, "I felt that I needed Iris to help me be a good mother. And if I had to do it again, if I was thirty today, it would have been different. I don't think I would have ... pushed for Melissa to do all those things." Instead, Barbara went to see the school guidance counselor, who recommended Melissa see a therapist. The therapist told Barbara there was nothing wrong with her daughter.

  "Part of it," Melissa said, "and I'm not blaming you at all, Mom, is that you would ask me, 'What are your plans? What are Camille and Nicola doing? What are your plans? Why aren't you playing with them?' You did that all the time." She turned to me. "I was getting it from my
mom. I don't want you to feel bad," she said, looking back at Barbara, "but it's true."

  "I can face it on my own," Barbara said.

  "I don't blame you," Melissa insisted. "But as encouraging as you were, there were periods where I felt like I was being compared to them and not good enough." One time, Melissa recalled, she and her mother saw Camille with a new haircut at a café. "You took me to get my hair cut, and you wanted me to be like her," Melissa told her mother.

  "You wanted the haircut," Barbara said.

  "No," Melissa insisted, "it was right after we saw her."

  Barbara and Melissa had never discussed their ordeal until our long lunch in Washington. Watching them, I knew immediately I had been given a great gift. So often when parents respond to a bullying situation, they instinctively focus their anger and blame on the bully. Despite the great difficulty of separating the feelings that surround these ordeals, Barbara's story underscores the need for parents to be mindful of their own role in their daughters' social choices.

  Barbara and Melissa also helped me see the benefits of honest communication between parents and children. Through them, I realized that parents must be more than tear wipers and back patters. Barbara might have made a tremendous difference in her daughter's life had she been willing to share the vulnerability and pain that were causing her to pressure her child into popularity. From Melissa's standpoint, Barbara appeared invulnerable, which only reinforced Melissa's sense of fault.

  Of course, Barbara's choice to make Melissa popular at any cost was conscious, and not all choices are. It is indeed a blessing and curse of human nature that we unwittingly create opportunities to repeat our own mistakes and to pass them on, like heirlooms, to the people we love the most.

  generations

  I met Donna and Tracy Wood through a college friend, and I spoke with mother and daughter in North Carolina separately by phone. Fifteen years after Tracy's ordeal, the two women narrated their stories with uncanny synchronicity, as well as generous openness.

  Tracy spent her first years on a large farm near Raleigh, playing mostly with her brother or her ponies. After Tracy's parents divorced, Donna won custody and moved the children into town. She inherited a healing, protective network of brassy ya-ya ladies who warmed the new home and treasured Tracy. When Tracy visited her father he was physically and mentally abusive, his affection sporadic. At times, Tracy was the apple of his eye; at others, it was as though she didn't exist. Her unsupervised visitations were taxing.

  In fourth grade, Tracy stunned her teachers by completing her math workbook during the first week of school. She was promptly skipped a grade into a class notorious for meanness. On the first day of fifth grade, the girls refused her at the lunch table, sniping that she wasn't really a fifth grader. They forced her to eat alone. After several days of solitude in the cafeteria, Tracy brought nail polish to entertain herself, and a monitor reprimanded her, consigning her to another silent lunch.

  The lunchtime isolation quickly became a school-day pastime for the popular girls. They continued to ostracize Tracy throughout middle school, telling her she was stupid, that her jokes were bad, her clothes all wrong. They taunted her about not wearing a bra when she was ten and flat as a board. In the bathroom one day, she listened from inside the stall as the ringleader warned Tracy's only friend not to hang out with her. The girl was stone cold the next time Tracy saw her. One summer, she became best friends with a popular girl who rode horses at an area barn. In September, the girl pretended she didn't know her.

  For years, Tracy suffered quietly. "I remember every day," Tracy told me. "It was just awful. Nobody liked me there. And I couldn't do anything right. Everything I did I got teased for. Nobody had the compassion or the maturity, including the teachers, to say this isn't cool, to say, stop it!"

  Sitting on the sofa three years after she started fifth grade, talking with her mother about the concept of courage, Tracy looked up and said, "You don't know how much courage it takes me to go to school every day."

  Donna asked her daughter what she meant. Tracy replied, "The girls don't want to let me sit with them." Donna was shocked. She had maintained contact with the school for years about her daughter's progress. "In this small private school," she told me, still seething nearly two decades later, "they couldn't bother to tell me that this child wasn't allowed to sit with anybody at recess or lunch. And I was appalled. I was absolutely undone."

  Naturally, now that the secret was out, Donna assumed her daughter would be relieved to switch schools.

  She was not.

  The popular girls had tossed confusing signals of kindness into the mix of cruelty, ensnaring Tracy in a cycle in which she repeatedly tried to win her tormentors over. Some days there would be a glimmer of hope: a kind look, a day without comment or taunt, a shared laugh at the water fountain. To Tracy it felt like enough. She explained to me, "I just sort of thought that was how it was, and that it was incumbent upon me to change it. At some point, I was just sure I was going to triumph over the odds and make them like me and get all the things I wanted at that age." Fleeting moments and scraps of friendship sustained her, leaving Donna to struggle against a daughter who dug in her heels and refused to give up. Donna tried to coax her daughter's teachers without alienating them. She strained to listen to Tracy and accommodate her needs, even as she realized with horror that home was the only place where her daughter would feel respected.

  But Tracy's resistance eventually slackened into a depression. Migraine headaches kept her out of school an average of three days a week, and she had to take shots of Demerol for the pain. One day, she found herself reading the same paragraph in her history book over and over again. For three months, her dog curled against her as she drifted in and out of consciousness.

  Suddenly, it was Sunday night and she had to return to school full-time on Monday. "And I thought," Tracy said, "I'd just rather die than go back to school."

  Tracy set her alarm for the middle of the night, awoke, and went downstairs. She got out some of the kitchen knives. "It just hurt," she said. "I sat down and fell asleep and woke up in the morning thinking I couldn't even do this right." Tracy went to her mother's bedroom, who assured her that she would not have to go to school. Tracy was hospitalized for several weeks. Nobody called.

  Of her daughter deep in depression, Donna said, "I saw a huge sense of helplessness. Real discouragement. And really noticeable. She had an absolutely wicked and delicious sense of humor. A lot of that disappeared. I would think, what happened to my little girl? It was like she was disappearing. She was getting so depressed it was just not her anymore. She told me that even though I said loving and supportive things, I didn't really know the picture—that she wasn't smart, she wasn't pretty, she wasn't worthwhile." Donna felt waves of frustration as she tried vainly to sway her daughter. "There were times when I just wanted to shake her. She would just not be moved. She would become almost mute. You could just see her silent, thinking emotionally."

  After several years of psychotherapy, Tracy understood that her steadfast refusal to leave the school was related to her relationship with her father. "I think my father's cycle of making me his favorite and then not having any interest in me created a cycle of wanting to win over people that didn't want to be won over," Tracy explained. "So it was like, if I could just be good enough or get the right pair of jeans, it was going to be okay again." Years later, Tracy remains awed by her own participation in her suffering. "I didn't have a sense of, my God, this is really messed up!" she told me, wonder palpable in her voice.

  Although Donna was unaware of it at the time, she believes her own tolerance of bullying at the hands of an abusive husband helped communicate to Tracy that with enough effort, a person can adjust to anything, no matter how painful. "Here was Tracy caught in an abusive relationship that she refused to leave," Donna said. Having spent years recovering from a traumatic divorce in which she was abandoned by many of her friends, in which she struggled with two young
children, little money, and alcoholism, Donna was realistic about why she didn't read between the lines. "I was still reeling from what had happened to me and what had happened to my children. I was dealing with my own issues," she said. She reacted to Tracy with the bottled rage, frustration, and anxiety that had been triggered by her own experience.

  Sometimes families transmit dynamics of their relationships to girls. That girls identify with the caregiving practices of their mothers is often celebrated. Yet as we have seen, there can be great risk where relationship becomes the primary currency of one's life. The girls in this book who have remained in abusive friendships at any cost bear disturbing similarity to people like Donna, who are survivors of relationship violence. (The connections between bullying and relationship violence are further explored in the final chapter.) Just as daughters may learn to love like their mothers, they may also be learning not to terminate relationships that have become dangerous.

  helplessness

  Elaine was sitting with her daughter Joanna, and we were talking about Joanna's problems with Amy. "I have to tell you," Elaine said, leaning forward to rest an elbow on her knee, "that it is so much work the second time around. I was so betrayed by my best friend. She was really my very best friend. I know how [Joanna] feels and that there's not much I can do. It's bad enough experiencing it yourself, but when you experience your child feeling those feelings, it's the most painful thing in the world."

  She gazed at her daughter, returning to the present. "With Joanna's [experience of bullying], I felt so defenseless and helpless, so hurt. I can't really say anything to make it better. At the very basic level, you want to protect your children from anything, do the best that you can. You keep them fed and you keep them sheltered and you give them love and all the things you think you can control, and from the moment you get a baby that is handed to you, it's the most incredible feeling and you love that child."