Secret Girls' Stuff (3 page)

My English penfriend Val is another person who became my best friend when I was seven years old but I didn’t meet her face to face till I was forty. You can have best friends through snail mail, email and the internet. All our teen years Val and I shared secrets through our letters and we still do.

When I was busy being a teenage widgie she was being a teenage rocker and going out with a rocker guy called Ronnie Simpkins. Rockers were called teddy boys and teddy girls in England. Ronnie was what we called a sort. A sort was a good-looking male. If we got one we’d say we’d ‘collected a sort’.

Last year I double-dared Val to put out an advertisement in the British papers for Ronnie to come forward because we wanted to see if he’d got fat and bald. She wasn’t game in case he’d turned into a serial killer or a Tupperware salesman or something and he started hanging round her. Do you think she should do it?

Best friends can last a lifetime and Val and I will
be friends forever even though there’s kilometres of ocean between us.

When I wrote the book
Love on the Net
I went to the island of Barbados in the Caribbean with her. Now that she has a new man in her life (not Ronnie!) we may never do that girl thing again — sit on the sand under a palm tree on a tropical island and talk our heads off, and tell each other our innermost hopes, dreams and fears. Sitting on that sand we made a vow together: ‘We are women of substance, not women of shit,’ and we set ourselves some goals which we are both achieving. Our friendship will always be there.

Here’s another email from Amy J about her friendship hassle:

Poor Amy found that school principals are seldom tolerant about illegal and inappropriate use of the internet, and that when parents try to sort things out they often get worse, and that girls can be bitchy.

Boys tend to handle arguments in different ways than girls. They can be more aggressive and resort to beating up on each other, although some girls can have a bitch fight, pull hair, punch and claw, and some boys can be bitchy.

During teen years girls are often ruled by their hormones. For no apparent reason you wake up mopey and can bawl at the drop of a hat, or yell at your parents over little things that normally wouldn’t bother you. Once hormones settle and get into a sort of rhythm it’s not so bad.

I’m not sure whether Lauren’s hormones are out of control in this letter or if she’s more of a
‘tomboy’ and deals with things physically:

And my answer:

Maybe Lauren needs to learn not to get physical with her friends. Friendship is a trust thing. It’s a bit hard to trust someone if you’re not sure if they’re going to beat up on you!

So, you can make friendships that last a lifetime. You can make new friendships that are ongoing. You can lose friends when they move or you have a fight with them or they take up new sports or hobbies that differ from yours. You can also have full-on or temporary friends on email or the internet.

The best thing about friends is that you can share activities like shopping, make-up, horoscopes, hopes, dreams and secrets.

There is a growing number of children and teenagers whose parents would rather teach them at home for different reasons, so they attend Home School. There are also children and teenagers who have School of the Air or correspondence lessons. There are probably some children or teenagers tucked away who’ve never been to school and may not even be able to read or write. But the majority of children and teenagers in Australia go to school! Some young people love school. Some don’t care one way or the other. For some it’s a comfort zone. Some
young people hate school.

And guess what? There are hordes of adults who feel exactly the same way.

‘My school never did anything for me and I never did anything for the school,’ is a comment I hear a lot from adults.

For many young people, school is a place where there are lots of rules and people called teachers to make sure the rules are followed.

When I worked at the alcohol and drug centre a lot of kids were on the street because they’d been chucked out of school for various reasons.

This is Rossie’s story:

I don’t want to get into a discussion about school policies and who should have done what in this situation. I know that putting anyone on a contract is probably doomed to failure because it’s almost impossible to be that perfect for the rest of your school life. I have met brilliant school counsellors who are totally overworked and underpaid, and I’ve met school counsellors who I
wouldn’t send my dog to, and there are some in between.

The problem in Rossie’s case was that there was no one she felt confident enough to tell her problems to and who would listen to her without dumping a load of advice in her ears. Her parents were going through a violent and messy separation, she felt totally rejected and that no one really cared. Her secret stuff was really chewing her up. So she ended up on the street, on drugs, getting used up sexually by a heap of guys, and feeling very bad about herself. I felt that a lot of her problems could have been avoided if she could have shared her secret worries and fears with someone she could trust.

One problem with many adults is that they want to
solve
your problem when you offload it. Often you just want to spill your guts and let it all out, then you can go on your merry way feeling heaps better.

Some schools have peer educators or junior counsellors or buddies who trot round wearing badges and looking for kids to help. You might want to talk to them about your problems and
then again you might not. The good thing about them is that they don’t have an office so they usually float round the school yard. This means you don’t have to actually make an appointment and hang about the pupil welfare coordinator or school counsellor’s office looking desperate. But on the other hand you mightn’t want to entrust your secret to another student who is practically a stranger, even if they seem sympathetic.

If you can’t trust your friends’ reactions to your secret, or you think they’ll give you a heap of advice that you don’t need, or you don’t feel like hearing some possibly heavy psycho-babble from a school social worker or psychologist, you need to find someone who will listen without piling advice onto you.

There is a new service called the Community Listening Project and the idea is that if people really stopped and listened to one another, we could build a safer and nicer community. So if you ever see someone in a shopping mall wearing a badge that says Person
Willing to Listen
, that’s what the person’s job is — to listen to anyone who wants to talk! This person has been trained
not to give advice or anything like that, but they try and put themselves in your shoes and see the world through your eyes. What a great idea!

However, you mightn’t be able to find this person when you need to. Sometimes this is where females in public toilets at the mirrors, and in shopping malls and at bus stops can be really useful, especially if you pick older grandma types or young women in their twenties who’ve probably gone through the same thing. You can start up a conversation, tell them what’s bugging you, offload the problem or the thing that’s getting up your nose, then walk away.

If they want to take you to their house or drive you anywhere it’s
not
a good idea, because after all they are strangers and could even be
strange
. You don’t need that on top of everything else! A milkshake in a public place is okay, but don’t tell them where you live or give them your phone number. If they want to help you by meeting again, then organise for it to happen in a public place where lots of people are around you, and see what they have to offer that could help you. This also applies if you want to meet someone you’ve
been corresponding with via email.

Like I said, most people are nice but there are some weirdos out there who can sound really genuine. That’s why it’s important not to go anywhere with a new person until you know them quite well and you’ve told someone else about this person as a backup in case things turn nasty.

Okay, so this was plain stupid but it made me more careful, especially when Ally got one of her spontaneous ideas.

So whether you’re meeting someone to talk things over or getting a ride home with your friends, try to let someone know where you are and who you’re with if you can. There are lots of weirdos out there who are clever at sucking you into to believing they’re ready to help you with your life.

Sorry if I sound like I’m deviating away from this section, School Stuff, but it sort of fits in, because school environments can cause problems and sometimes teachers are too busy to notice, or counsellors are snowed under with
big
problems
and they might think that yours is insignificant. But it’s important to you, which makes it big.

If you try to tell people about your problem or secret and no-one will listen you can always phone Kids Help Line or Lifeline or Youth Works or Dial a Mum and chat to someone there. The telephone operator will give you the number for your city or town. Sometimes it’s easier to talk to an anonymous person on the end of a phone line.

They’ll listen to all sorts of problems, especially ones about friends, family and school.

But, hang on. It could be you who is in the role of listening to a secret or a problem. I remember when my daughter was at high school and one of her friends told her that a teacher was trying to crack onto her. He obviously didn’t have just a regular teacher-student relationship in mind. And he’d threatened to fail the girl in his subject if she didn’t go with him to his house after school.

The best thing to do in this case was
not
keep this secret and to persuade the girl to see the school counsellor or welfare coordinator, or year level coordinator, or even the principal. Teachers are not allowed to have intimate relationships
with their students, in or out of school.

If someone is trying to tell
you
something, whether it’s about school stuff or not, it’s really important to listen carefully.

Okay, Judy wasn’t exactly a friend but she needed someone to listen to her.

Tips for listening to a friend:

1. Focus your full attention on the person you are listening to and don’t interrupt them with your own stories, like, ‘Oh yeah, that happened to me when Jane phoned up Belinda behind my back and said … blah, blah, blah, and then I said blah, blah, blah …’ Just listen.
   
2. Try to listen not only to the words but also for the feelings behind the things the person is saying.
   
3. Try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. In other words, imagine that you are that person. Try to experience their world with them.
   
4. Let the person know that you’ve heard what they are saying by doing this thing called paraphrasing. That means you repeat what they’ve said to show that you understand that they are feeling bad, mad, glad or sad. It shows that you are truly listening!
   
5. Try not to give advice unless the person says, ‘What should I do?’ Then offer some options. The person really needs to take responsibility and make his/her own choice of options, even if you personally don’t think it’s a good choice.
   
6. Try to listen for the deeper feelings, because when someone sounds angry they are often hurt and sometimes fearful. Anger and fear often go together. Under sadness there is often anger too.
   
7. If you think the person isn’t telling you the whole story, just try to accept what they have told you for the moment. Remember it is their secret anger/fear/joy/guilt/triumph, not yours, and they have the right to tell you only what they want to.
   
8. If the secret is really awful and involves danger to someone, suggest that you go together to talk to a trustworthy adult. Often the person might just need someone to go with them in a supportive role. So sit outside the room while they talk to the adult. That’s what I should have done with Judy.
   

Sometimes at school things can get very complicated when rumours start flying round the place. In fact lots of rumours start at school and spread like a grassfire, and the heat can be very intense for the poor person who is the butt of the rumour.

Once a school principal phoned me at the Alcohol and Drug Centre where I was working and said, ‘Margaret, could you come to the school assembly on Monday morning and speak to all the girls? There’s been an episode of glue sniffing and I’d like you to tell the whole school how dangerous it is.’

I said, ‘No. I won’t come and talk to the whole school. First of all probably 90 per cent of the girls haven’t ever thought about sniffing glue or anything else. If I make a big deal about it some of them will think they
should
be doing it! Like, they’ll think it’s the cool thing to do! How many girls are involved in this glue-sniffing?’