Are You A Mean Girl?

This week we celebrated International Women’s Day! Congratulations to all of my strong female friends and family members who are doing their best every single day to make life work for themselves and their families. While trying to decide what my next post would be about, the idea nearly fell into my lap. As women, we STILL face adversity at every turn. On average, men are still being paid more than women, we are slowly reverting back to a time when we have no say or control over the decisions surrounding our own bodies, the ratio of men to women in politics is far lower than 50/50, as it should be, and to top it all off, we face shaming every single day by our own gender. In a world ruled by men and their egos, you shouldn’t have to worry about what your peers and coworkers are saying behind your back. Why are women putting each other down instead of helping to lift one another up??? So I ask you this, Are you a mean girl?

When I was in high school, like many, I was targeted by means girls a lot. One of the more memorable instances was during my Freshman or Sophomore year. I was dating a neighbor boy who was a little bit older than I was. The girls in his grade didn’t like this for some reason so they would taunt me in the halls or try and spit on me from the balconies. The worst of it was during lunch one day when I was slammed up against a wall and called a number of derogatory names. It always confused me why this was happening. I had never spoken more than two words to any of these girls but for some reason they got enjoyment out of making my life a living hell. I never let it show in front of them. I would cry in the bathroom or wait until I got home to be visibly upset, the whole time telling myself that I just had to make it through high school and then it would be over…Boy was I wrong!

Because this is an honest blog and I aim for complete openness, I will take a moment to admit that my skin is extremely thin. I have ALWAYS been a bit of a pushover, hating confrontation and doing everything in my power to avoid it. It is possible that the taunting in high school and later on college or the jobs we hold is meant to be character building for some women. And it is possible that I let words hit me a lot deeper than others do…I understand that. However, I still don’t believe that makes this kind of behavior excusable on any level.

One of my first serving jobs was at a local pizza place, which happened to have an all female serving staff. In time this grew to be one of my absolute favorite jobs I’ve ever held but geez was I put through the ringer the first few months. I felt like I had to prove myself worthy of the other girls; for their friendship, for their loyalty and for their acceptance of me working there. Those of you who have never faced this adversity in a job setting, it is really tough concentrating on being a great employee when you are obsessing about pleasing your coworkers all the time. And I don’t want to just pick on the girls at this pizza place! This kind of female hazing has happened at just about every single serving gig I have ever done. Why?? I ended up being close to almost every one of the women I worked with so wouldn’t it have just been easier to be accepting from the get go?

Fast forward a few years. I had graduated college and was building my resume with a timeshare group out of Branson. This is already a dog eat dog world without having to worry about what the women of timeshare think of you. Here, I shared an actual work space with a women who would all but froth at the mouth when looking across her desk at me. I never got an answer as to why she hated me so much but she definitely never tried to hide the fact of the matter, talking about me right in front of me or making nasty faces at me while I spoke. At one point in time, after I had started traveling with a roadshow team, I was in a work environment with two women who literally kept taking pictures of me, sending them to each other and laughing uncontrollably about it…Being completely obvious that they were making fun of me and not caring a bit that I knew. Why? For what reason is this every necessary and especially in a work space? I hardly knew them and they hardly knew me. The stories of this kind of behavior are endless!

In one of my most raw examples of mean girl behavior, my child’s father had just left us and gone back to his ex. Instead of him facing the wrath of his life decisions and what he had done to her, she began to attack me. Mind you, I was six months pregnant when the hateful, late night phone calls began, her telling me how much she hated me and my baby, how much he hated me and our baby and each and every bad thing he ever said about me. At one particularly shining moment, she called me and put me on speaker phone while she continued to ask him questions about me and he would answer honestly, not know that I was listening on the line. To this day, this woman takes her anger out on every single person but the one who hurt her the most. Why is the man in this situation not being held accountable for his decisions and why couldn’t we stick together as women for both being terribly wronged by the same person?

Over the years and especially after becoming a mother, I have made some real strides in thickening my skin. I live in a good place of  telling myself that women who take part in this kind of behavior, are obviously hurt themselves and have some deep seeded insecurities. I would be lying if I said that I had never been caught up in judgmental girl bashing behavior or potentially harmful gossip. Does that excuse behavior like this? Hell no! But how do we change it? How can each and every single one of us make strides to change these attitudes towards women which quite frankly have become common place?

I wish I had a perfect solution to this problem. But this is an opinion blog based from my own life experiences so I am only able to offer my point of view, which is this: During our adolescent years, we are given a little more room to learn from the mistakes we make. This is no excuse once you are in your adult life, ESPECIALLY if you  are raising young women yourselves. It breaks my heart to think that one day, Sawyer could be crying in the bathroom because of mean girl behavior. But that is something out of my control completely. What I can control however, is teaching my daughter that as women, we lift each other up not rip each other apart. We stick together in a world that often times seems to be against us. And most importantly, you will always attract more bees with honey than you do with vinegar.

It starts with each and every one of us! Do your part. Be a strong woman who raises strong women and on top of it all, don’t be a mean girl!

-HonestMomma