Entry #10: Slumber Parties and Civil Unrest

When I was told via ultrasound back in 2002 that the rolling, lurching, kicking symbiote within my gut was without question a boy, I rejoiced as much as one can when lying prone on a table with one's swelling gut covered in goo and one's bladder full to the point of bursting. I had always wanted to have boys--twin boys, in fact, and I stood a good chance of getting just that--so when the lab tech, an efficient but humourless woman in a starched grey uniform (a typical NHS employee, in other words) told me the good news, even indicating the body part in question on the grainy screen, I internally danced a little jig of glee for many, many reasons.

I grew up with an older brother. I knew boys got the coolest clothes (no dainty ruffles or smarmy kittens and lace adorning the shirts). They got the coolest toys, loud noisy ones which easily withstood abuse and tumbles down the stairs, things that arced and zapped and which tickled one's brain. They got to play football and get as muddy as they liked. The didn't have to sit down to have a wee. They could do pull ups. No one ever seemed to expect them to be tidy or polite.

Mostly, no one ever said to them, "That's not very lady-like...now eat nicely, keep your legs crossed, wear this bow in your hair...awww, now aren't you just a DOLL??" Even when I was young I could see the disparity and the unfairness of being a female in the world, where one was required to be as small and quiet as possible and not make elaborate explosion noises when you took out another's target in "Battleship".

Girls weren't supposed to make armpit or hand farts, do jack knives off the diving board, or even win a dodgeball. We were meant to be pretty and supportive, and we were supposed to play with tea sets and dolls. This was very shortly after the whole feminist revolution/ERA/women back in the workplace revolution, so the ripples of change took a long time to reach our suburbs. To her my mother did her best to provide me with whatever toys I wanted at Christmas and birthday time, be it a Barbie Style Me Head or an Erector Set, but typically, the "gender" toys were still very, very prevalent.

What you learn first as a child tend to stick with you. Even though I vowed that any child of mine would play with whatever toy they wanted, some tiny stubborn vein deep within said otherwise.

So when the technician said, "It's a boy..." I thought, "COOL. No little play stoves in my lounge. No piles of nude dolls dripping in the bathtub, pink ribbons tangled in the washing, bottles of Tinkerbell soap and perfume upended on the carpet...no bra shopping, no bitchy slamming of doors, rolling of eyes, no having The Talk...but most of all, NO SLUMBER PARTIES."

Boys are so direct. If they have a fight, they duke it out, and the next day, they're friends. Girls go in for character assassination. One whispered word about someone, and the next day it is a tidal wave of rumours and hate. Girls turn on each other faster than rain falls. They learn how to sneer and huff before they learn to take solids. They switch best friends like dance partners.

And all of this is never so clearly demonstrated in so short an amount of time as the slumber party.

Whomever came up with the idea that getting a group of overstimulated young females together at night and expecting them to bunk down on someone's living room floor in total harmony was a complete nitwit and a moron. Looking back, I don't know why so many parents let their daughters have slumber parties because nobody sleeps, someone always winds up crying brokenheartedly in a corner, someone pukes, and someone always calls their mom at midnight wanting to be taken home because "they're all making fun of me".

And the worst thing? EVERYONE gets into a fight. Not just a little spat or a disagreement, but a huge soul-crushing, us-against-them fight, sometimes physical but always cruel. It's what happens when good-intentioned parents invite a group of little girls over for cake, ice cream, candy, soda, and games. What else could the result be? Everyone's excited about spending the night away from home and with their friends. Added to that some incredibly stimulating food and drink, and it truly is a bomb one tick short of an explosion.

I went to countless slumber parties as a girl. I hosted even more. At my very first slumber party, a celebration of my 8th birthday, a friend named Marci brought a feather boa that leaked tiny white feathers all over the house and which my mother was still hoovering up two years later. But that night, Marci also brought the most contraband of all possible things: MAKE UP.

When you're 7 or 8 years old, make up is a more tradeable commodity than gold. The day my mother allowed me to buy at a tiny compact of "Princess Play Cosmetics" blue/green eyeshadow from the K-Mart, I knew I'd just entered the exchange. The make up, of course, washed off with soap and water, but even so...once word leaked out that someone had brought an eye shadow or a "Crayon" lipstick to a slumber party and had it stashed in their overnight bag, all the attention went to her, no matter what activities had been planned.

So it was with Marci, who'd brought a tube of fruit punch pink lipstick, some eye shadow, and sparkly nail polish that peeled off when it dried. I was devastated because it showed she was older and more sophisticated than me, as my mother refused to buy me anything like it. Like me, Marci had an older sister, so seeing make-up on someone's dresser wasn't all that heart-stopping for us. And there were times my sister would put some of hers on my face just to experiment. But it was strictly verboten to wear it outside the house, even at Christmas or for pictures. Bringing it to a party was a big, big thing.

But no matter--once everyone found out and had a look at the little glass bottles, the excitement waned, and we went on with our games and snacking and dancing.

That particular slumber party carried on until past midnight when we all decided that taking the little balloons I'd spent the afternoon blowing up and stuffing them down the front of our night shirts and go strutting around was just the thing we needed, screaming and laughing our heads off at everyone's big chests. When someone's balloon popped unexpectedly, that just set us into screams of hysterical laughter.

That was when my dad thundered down the stairs and informed us that if we did not settle down and go to sleep, he would drive each and every one of my friends home, and he didn't care what time it was when the rang the bell and explained to their mothers that they were just too naughty to stay at my house.

We cooled our jets after that. By that point, we were all pretty tired, so we rolled out our sleeping bags, compared pajamas and stuffed animals, clustered around each other, turned out the lights, and started to talk. And talk. And giggle. And talk some more. Then argue. Someone said something that sounded like something mean, and someone else heard it and related it to the other side of the room which made someone else really mad and muttered "She thinks she's so great" into a pillow which was heard by someone else. And that's when things started to slip.

Then the polarizing started. One group pulled their sleeping bags together on one side of the room, and the other group, which had supposedly started the cruel rumour, huddled together on the other side, whispering and pointing. Suddenly all the fun we'd had during the evening evaporated, and words were being flung back and forth across the lounge like verbal bombs, getting uglier and uglier until someone was crying. A lamp got turned on, and everyone looked around to find the source of the tears. It was usually a person I'd invited to the party out of pity because she never got invited to any parties, mostly because at some point she always wound up in tears and saying, "I want to go home. You all are so mean. I KNOW you're talking about me. I'm calling my mother!"

"Well, it was JANE who started it," said an accusatory voice at last.

"I did NOT!" Jane snapped back. "Marci said something mean about my friend Julie who's not even here!"

"It was NOT about Julie!" Marci yelled. "It was about my cousin who lives in Michigan!"

"I heard Julie," Jane said to the nods of everyone else. "Everyone knows you're jealous of her because her dad's rich and you want to be just like her."

"Nuh UHHHHHH!" said Lainey, Marci's best friend. "Her dad's not rich! Not THAT rich. I've been to their house...it's not that big. Whoever said she's rich is stupid!"

"You think you're so great," Shelly piped up, glaring at Lainey. "You and Marci. You're always going off at recess and doing stuff and talking about every one else. You two have always been like that. You make fun of everyone if they're not just like YOU or wear the same clothes as you or take dance lessons."

The Crier would start up again. "I! Wanna! Go! Home! I have a s-s-tomach ache!"

"Guys," I'd try, seeing that blood would probably be drawn soon, "my dad's gonna be back down here any minute--"

"I'm not gonna sleep by her," Tanya announced, usually neutral but riled to action by lack of sleep. "I don't want to be near someone mean! Who knows what she'd do to me in my sleep??" She scootched her sleeping bag to the middle of the room, a lone island. "Good NIGHT!"

"I didn't SAY anything about anyone here!" Marci yelped. "But you know what? I will now, since you all THINK I did. I may as well."

"Oh great," snapped Jane, rolling her eyes. "What makes you think you're so great that you can say anything about anyone and we all have to hear?"

Shelly got to her knees and nudged her sleeping bag by Tanya. "I'm tired too. If any of you bothers me when I'm asleep, I'm telling my DAD!"

"Well, I heard you liked Tony Smith," Lainey hissed at Shelly. "I heard you want to kiss him and let him feel your boobies. And you know what? He doesn't even like you back. He likes Sarah in 4th grade. I heard him say so."

"Who's Tony Smith?" my best friend Diane whispered to me, usually silent and shaking when these arguments broke out.

"I think he's in Mrs. Green's class," I whispered back, and Diane nodded, lay back down snuggling her R2-D2 doll, and closed her eyes. She never got involved in the slumber party arguments because she had three older sisters and was used to this sort of senseless bickering.

"I don't even HAVE boobies!" Shelly hollered back. "That's stupid!"

"You wear a bra, though," Marci put in. "Why do you wear a bra if you don't have boobies? I bet you get your period too. My mom saw your mom buying maxi pads the other day at Giant."

Shelly looked ready to explode. "Those were FOR my mom!" she snapped. "Did that ever occur to you? And I wear HALTER top only during soccer games for protection."

"Protection for what? Your BOOBIES!" Lainey grinned.

"Will you guys shut UP?" Tanya yelled. "Whatever you're arguing about, it can wait till morning. I'm trying to sleep!"

"YOU shut up!"

"YOU shut up!"

"SHUT UP!"

A throw pillow flew threw the air and hit Diane in the head. She sat up, grabbed it, and said, "HEY! What'd I do??" before launching it back.

Pretty soon the room was full of stuffed animals and pillows being flung back and forth like plush missiles. Their impact may have been soft, but their intent was to harm. Two more people started to cry, and someone ran to the bathroom, slammed the door, and locked it.

A shaky quiet settled in with a lot of whispering. I sat up in my sleeping bag, wondering what I'd done wrong and where if my party was going so poorly. I remember wishing they'd all just go home if this was the way they were going to be. The lounge was a mess, everyone was mad, and no one seemed happy to be there. What could I do to fix it?

Eventually we all fell asleep and woke up about 6 hours later, groggy but hungry. Everyone still seemed to be peeved, but when my mom started making pancakes in her big electric cooker and serving them up, the mood improved, and pretty soon everyone was getting dressed and comparing toothpastes. By the time the parents came to take everyone home, no one could remember what we were fighting about, and as each guest departed with a goody bag clutched in one hand, they said it was the best party they'd gone to in ages and someone always said they were going to have a slumber party for their birthday in the next couple of weeks and invite me back.

It always went down like that. The details might change, but the mechanism was always the same. At one slumber party I actually got into a fistfight with another little girl and wound up sitting for an hour with an ice pack on my swollen nose. At another, the arguing got so bad that I went to sleep huddled next to Diane with socks stuffed in my ears because I didn't want to hear any more cruel words. At yet another, I went to sleep on the linoleum blocking the front door so that Stacy's father had to shift me in the morning to go to work. I have no idea why.

My next two parties were theme parties. One year everyone had to wear a costume, and the next, I threw a toga party. Everyone wanted to come to those parties, but my mom insisted on narrowing the list down to six people. She said she couldn't handle any more than that ever again.

And now that I have a daughter of my own, I look at her and think that of all the misfortunes that she'll have to deal with just because she's female--the overwhelming competitiveness to be the prettiest, the skinniest, the most liked--one of the worst things she'll ever have to encounter is a slumber party. Times may have changed, but little girls don't.

Maybe I'll just buy her some makeup and a feather boa and hope for the best.