Dilemma for a young girl

august 7 2007

Sometimes life offers dilemas and one of the girls had one.
It was tough to find a way out without hurting someone.

We haven't been on vacation.
No summercamp, nothing.

So the children saw other people leave and had to find ways to enjoy themselves and have a happy vacation without being at a camp, abroad or at summerschool.

No problem.
We just slipped in a kind of summerroutine.
Especially as the weather was bad almost all the time.

Now families come back home, because schools for the young ones start next monday.

One of the girls wants to be a friend of one of my girls.
Her mother thinks we're a good match, so she's arranging things, is creating opportunities for her daughter.
I bet she is a loving mom.

But she doesn't care much about the feelings of others.

They're pefectly OK to stand at the door in the morning at 8. Even after I told her it interfered very much with the safe feeling of my autistic son. Meaning he would be unhappy for the rest of the day.
It's OK to come at 10... but at 8... We have only one shower for 8 people, so we're not even showered at that time during the vacation.

She called yesterday. It was almost 22.00 hours, so we wondered who called us with which pressuring issue.
It was the girl. She wanted one of my girls to come over and sleep there.

Well, my girls were already to bed, so she was told that my daughter would call back whenever she had the time. For today and tomorrow things were planned, so it might be a while before she would get a call.

This morning the phone rang.
The mother. If we had given the message to our daughter and why she hadn't called back.
They wanted her to come to sleep there.

In a way I felt they didn't care about what my daughter wanted.

So me and my girl had a long talk about friendship. About being honest in a friendship.
Not only towards someone else, but also towards yourself.

She told that she experienced that "friendship" as a burden, but that she didn't want to disappoint the girl or make her feel unhappy.

We made plans for the only evening that was not yet taken in her agenda, so she can honestly say them she can't come to sleep there.
We also agreed she would be honest when the mother would say she would miss out on a lot of fun.
She feels she has fun at home too. And she likes to be with her twinsis. She doesn't feel she misses out of the fun.

Isn't it great to be able to talk about these things with my daughter?