My first look.

We were driving and my daughter was tired and restless.  Since I was in the back seat, I kept giving her toys to play with, hoping to engage her for a few more minutes.  Finally, we all decided that we needed to stop engaging her, so that she could fall asleep.  We did this knowing that there would be a brief period of crying before she transitioned into sleep.  As we suspected, she started crying.  I tried to ignore her by looking out the window or twiddling my thumbs. (It is VERY hard to ignore a crying baby!)  Finally, I looked up at her and there it was — my first GLARE.  I was horrified.  My loving, sweet baby girl was looking at me with hate in her eyes.  "Steve," I said to my husband, "our daughter just gave me my first mad look."  He reached back to give my hand a squeeze and said lovingly, "There will be many more of those."  Before long, my daughter was sound asleep.  She awoke an hour later with a huge smile on her face and pounced into my arms with a giggle, all anger forgotten.  Phew!  I survived my first glare!

A girl I know!

I am the School Counselor at a small school in the Seattle area.  Once a week I have an open lunch for any 5th or 6th grade girl that wants to attend.  One day, my regulars were gossiping and my relational aggression radar went off — something big was going down.  They told me that there was this girl who had moved to the school, became instantly really popular, and was now kicked out of the group.  All her friends hated her.  I asked the teacher what was going on and she confirmed that there was a lot of "stuff" going on in her classroom and she was really having a hard time dealing with all of it.  (I didn't work with this particular teacher and didn't know a lot of her students except for the few that came to lunch each week.)

The next week, my regulars attended with the said girl in tow.  I was expecting her to be down in the dumps.  She told the group that her friends had indeed abandoned her, but that she had moved on.  As far as I could tell, this girl was relatively mellow considering what had gone on.  I wondered to myself what traits this girl may possess that helped her keep her sense of self-esteem in the face of major friendship upheavals.  She's kind-of my hero.  When I was her age, my self-esteem crumbled under similar circumstances.  It's nice to see instances where a girl can take these kinds of situations with a grain of salt.  One of the main goals of Creative Crossings is to help tough friendship issues become not so much of a crisis.  I was very impressed with her handling of the situation and wondered if it came in part from having older friends outside of school who were able to offer her a bigger perspective.  Regardless, as usually happens, she made up with the "popular" girls and still kept the new friends she had made.  It was lovely to see this girl laughing and being goofy with both her old friends and her new friends — filled with confidence and radiance.  I loved watching it and felt that many girls could learn a lot from her!