Be the Bigger B

I got some parenting advice after school today from a former teacher and current colleague of mine. He was talking about the difficulties of having a thirteen-year-old daughter and how much attitude and sass gets tossed around his house on the regular, and how he has to put the kibosh on it almost everyday. I said that I feel like Ella already has thirteen-year-old attitude, and I'm a little afraid of how much worse it can get.

Her newest thing is when she tells me something and if I say, "What?" she gets all upset and says, "I already telled you!" and refuses to repeat herself.

I was telling my colleague about how she refuses to sit at the table at dinnertime and will only eat sitting on the living room floor, or how she has to approve her outfit choices in the morning, or how every night we have to close her door the perfect amount- not too much, not too little, and how when we leave, we have to blow her kisses all the way downstairs. Sometimes we are allowed to use our hands to blow kisses, and sometimes we have to do it with just our lips.

Believe me, I know what you're thinking, but the truth is that these things just develop somehow. Kids are smart. They push you little by little, until one day you find yourself feeding a two-and-a-half year old a Popsicle on the couch.

I explained to my colleague that Ella is a lot of wonderful things, but she can also be a brat. If we went to high school together, she would have been that tough, pretty girl I was kind of afraid of. She might have been Parker Posey's character in Dazed and Confused, or Regina from Mean Girls. Okay, maybe she's more like Hermione Granger or Ferris Bueller's girlfriend, but still, she's an alpha female. She's Daphne, and I'm Velma. She's Kelly Taylor and I'm Brenda Walsh (Though in real life I think she'd be Shannen Doherty- that girl is scary).

The point is that sometimes Miss Ella B is kind of a bitch, a way better bitch than I am, to which my learned colleague replied, "Then you need to be a bigger bitch."

I realized in that moment that this is some of the best advice I've ever gotten. This light bulb went off in my head about what I need to do to reign this girl in. I have to learn how to be the bigger bitch. But realization is not enough here. I have to actually do it. I'm not sure how that's going to look yet, but I wanted to let you guys know that I'm going to work on it and see what I come up with. Stayed tuned for updates on my bitchiness.