It seems my eleven-year-old daughter has a new friend. Although I
haven't met her, I've heard a lot about her. Apparently she's the same
age, height, and build as my daughter, but with bright blue hair,
multiple body piercing, and a henna snake tattoo. She wears things like
sliced up jeans and suede halter-tops to school. On top of that, she's
allowed to stay up as late as she wants to, play inappropriate video
games, and watch B horror movies. She never has to clean her room and
keeps all fifty pair of her trendy low cut jeans in a pile stuffed
underneath her bed.
Now I know what you're thinking. You're probably thinking that I must
be some kind of negligent parent to let my daughter associate with such
a bad influence. And, well, you're right.
But, you see, her name is Everybody Else. And, chances are, if you're
a parent of a middle schooler, your child hangs around with her, too.
Oh, at first, she seems quite harmless. You'll be sitting around the
kitchen table giving high fives because of the great deal you found on a,
say, purple rolling backpack and your eleven-year-old will suddenly
say, "But Everybody Else has a blue one."
You absent-mindedly nod in a "that's nice, Honey" sort of a way, and go
on about your business.
But then later you'll say something like, "It's 9:00 so you'd better
get ready for bed." And your eleven-year-old will say, "But Everyone
Else gets to stay up until 10:00."
And so it goes until, sooner or later, you find out that Everybody Else
is also allowed to ride on motorcycles with sixteen-year-old boys, wear
cut off fish net stockings, paint her toe nails purple, and listen to
Marilyn Mason CD's.
In short, you really start to hate Everybody Else.
But, as infuriating as Everybody Else is, let me just say her mother is
even worse.
Take, for instance, the other day when I asked my daughter to turn off
the television. She said, "Everybody Else's mom lets them watch
television before doing homework." When I said she couldn't have a slumber
party until she's sixteen, she informed me that, "Everybody Else's mom
invites whole Girl Scout troops over to sleep." And when I served
store bought cake for my daughter's eleventh birthday, she said, you
guessed it, "Everybody Else's Mom makes cakes from scratch."
Face it, Everybody Else's mom makes the rest of us look, well, bad.
Now a wiser person would've recognized this for what it is and risen
above it. But me, I am not this wise. So you can't really blame me
when, last night, during a fifteen minute diatribe on what kind of
deprived life my daughter leads because she doesn't have her own cell phone,
I heard myself say, "I don't care if Everybody's Else's mom likes loud
rap music, or makes bologna casserole for Thanksgiving dinner or
approves of multiple body piercing, if I ever catch her alone in an aisle at
the grocery store I'm going to grab her by the nose ring and give her a
piece of my mind!"
You have to just marvel at a life that can bring a rational human being
to say things like this and mean it.
But I'm not that worried, really. Lately my daughter's starting to hang
out with a better crowd. In fact, last night, when I asked her to go
to bed she said, "No Body Else goes to bed before nine o clock." And
when I asked her about her C on her history test, she said, "No Body Else
got an A on last week's history test."
You know, I'm starting to really like this No body Else kid.
And I can't wait to meet her mother. Something tells me we're going to
get along great.
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Debbie Farmer is a syndicated parenting columnist and the author of "Don't Put Lipstick on the Cat!" (Hardback, 227 pgs.) available at bookstores, bn.com, or Amazon.com Sign up for Debbie's Free e-column at: www.familydaze.com
