Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-04-24 - 7:07 p.m.

Wolverines

Wolverines: small mammals in the rodent family, characterized by extreme aggressiveness and viciousness. Wolverines are, pound for pound, the meanest animals alive.

But wolverines can't hold a candle to adolescent girls.

My daughter is there. She's a member of a vicious and unstable triplet of girls of that age. She comes home in anguished tears. They have snubbed her.

"We don't like you any more," they tell her. And I know how fully those words destroy: years of tap dance lessons, awards for academic achievement, triumphant certificates brought home and taped on the wall - they don't matter. Nothing matters. She is nothing. They don't like her any more.

But while I comfort her - trying not to say anything as vapid and completely beside-the-point as the things my mother said to me - I know that yesterday she and another girl rounded on someone else, rending her flesh with glee, thinking only, "Let it not be ME today."

So I add something completely beside-the-point, as my mother may have: Be sure you don't treat anyone this way. Don't be the cause of as much hurt as you feel today. But I can see it slide right by her, that concept that someone else's pain could be as deep as what she feels today. Whatever glimmer of adult empathy is there in her now, tomorrow it will be overshadowed by the incredible relief of not being the target herself.

I tell her of the wolverines. I tell her that she'll be hurt again in her life, but it may never feel as soul-destroying as what she'll feel these next few years. And that while I know it doesn't feel like it counts much today - and that's all right - that I love her very much, exactly as she is, right this very minute. She's heard it before.

And I tell her another story. I tell her about Cheryl Baldridge.

Cheryl went to sixth grade with me. She was a nice girl, quiet, not unusually bright or unusually loud or unusual in any way - but one: she had the misfortune to develop early, and to be buxom, even matronly, in a class of budding wolverines.

They tormented her. They snickered, and they whispered, and drew pictures. And one day they made a ring around her at recess, chanting their vicious nickname: "Boulder Butt! Boulder Butt! Boulder Butt!" until she fled to the office in hysterics.

Yes, I chanted.

I chanted not because I disliked her, or because she'd ever hurt me. In fact, I think I may even have played at her house, although I wouldn't have told anyone about that. I chanted for one reason: it made me safe. As long as I was part of the circle, and not its center, I was safely in the land of It's Not Me Today. And for a pimply, four-eyed loner, that safety was worth selling my soul.

I tell my daughter this story because it hasn't an ending. More than thirty years later, I'm still sorry. Other memories of sixth grade are faded, but that one remains. We all survive adolescence - but a wrong you can't apologize for, a wrong you did to your own soul as much as anyone else, these things hang with you.

I know something about my daughter's capacity to be a wolverine. And I know that she'll remember who she is, and all she's done, and what she believes in, and how much more these things mean than the unthinking hurt her cronies handed her today.

They don't like her today. They'll like her tomorrow. And if I'm doing what I'm trying to do on this blind path of guiding her growth, she'll like herself down the road.

But I am sorry, Cheryl.

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