words

So I've a new Tuesday ritual these days. As I have become a regular "soccer mom" as a nanny for three of my favorite girls, Tuesdays is gymnastics day. I spend a solid hour or so sitting there in a stinky gym watching multiple girls flip and flop and turn and twist, etc. Reminds me of the days I attempted to be a gymnast. That was before I had put it all together that my limbs were far too long to be agile and graceful like a gymnast and I was meant to awkward and gangly.

So as I sit there I usually create this interested yet not checked in glaze over (all while I attempt to cram studying in too). All the overbearing parents are pacing in the balcony trying to find their child on the gym floor or trying to control their other child as they run back and forth driving everyone else insane. It can become quite comical on some days to just watch it all go down and produce my own story for every persons lives in my head (usually makes me feel better about the mundane day to day I live).

Yet this past Tuesday as I was being ultimate second mom holding the girls shoes as the finished class, I saw a group of three girls sitting on a wall waiting for their class which was next. What caught my attention was the little tude (attitude) that one girl spoke with. She was telling the other two what some girl had said about one of them a few days ago. She swore that she stood up for them because she "lovesssssssss" her and would never do that (all said in that little girl attitude that you are never wrong... ever). "She probably just doesn't know you that well," said the original extreme tude girl. Immediately my heart sank because right then and there I snapped back to when so many people talked behind my back in elementary and middle school. It is what it is and I don't want any apologies or anyone to feel sorry for me because I'm still alive and kickin today. However it is those smart-alic girls like the one I witnessed in that stinky gym that cause so much harm. She didn't need to spread what the other girl had said behind her "supposed" friends back. It wasn't nice so why repeat it.

I'm not going to stand up on my soap box about the cruelty girls go through at that age because I'm not sure if it will ever change. I do know that my heart was forever hurt and changed as a result of some girls that were just like stinky gym girl on Tuesday. Words may be just letters together and then put into sentences but they are so powerful and so deceptive. Makes me think back to what I said to those girls when they were mean to me years ago. I'm not exactly sure what I did say, but I do know the tears that I came home with every day and the pain that sat with me for days. They're only words and yet they are so much more.