Recently, my teenage daughter came home from school in a
complete tizzy. To shorten a rather long and drama-filled story, the mother of
a girl at school she’d been having a problem with entered the fray on Facebook.
The mother, without actually naming my daughter, made her opinion on a child
clear for the world, or at least her friends, to see.
Now, I’ll be frank. My first reaction was to drive over to
this woman’s house and hold her head in a toilet until she relented and removed
the offensive post. I am a Texan mother, and we go a bit mad when our children
are threatened. But because I had no desire for jail time, or to have video of
the incident end up on YouTube, I took a deep breath and calmed down.
Sanity returned, and I looked for a way to calm my girl
down. And then it occurred to me: what could this woman really do? What does it
really say about her that she would speak ill of a child on her Facebook page?
So that’s what I told my daughter.
“She could get me expelled!” she wailed. The history of this
melodrama has recorded numerous instances where the other child made up
accusations against mine, and a teenager’s reaction to adversity is usually
over-the-top, as my daughter was demonstrating.
“Would I let that happen?” I asked her. I looked straight
into her eyes while I spoke, letting her see the angry mother bear in mine.
“No.”
“Exactly. Don’t worry about it,” I said back, and she
didn’t.
Because Texas women don’t let anyone mess with their
children.
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