Wednesday, June 19, 2002

danny was willing to cook for us tonite, which is much appreciated as we can hardly stand. i ended yesterday despondent, convinced i had no talent with children and worse, that my ineptitude reflected my general difficulties interacting within a group. cuz, as i said to sorelle, kids aren't that different from people.

maybe because i rejoined the girlz an attitude far removed from the one in which i'd left them, in turn maybe because today was my last day taking horrid medication as an appetizer to every meal, everything went cheerfully-smooth. we've had one discussion per day and our first two went discouragingly badly. our girls, however talkative amongst themselves, clam up when it comes to serious topics, or as addie suggests, abstract thought. we agonized over how to plan today's, Women in School, and finally settled on performing four short skits from our experience. and it worked.
we also played capture the flag, and sorelle and i managed to teach them basic html code, and sarah led them in communal story-writing, all successfully. every day, at least to my mind, is more of a triumph than the previous one.

tomorrow we're counting on the trend to continue. tomorrow we're dragging that old horse puberty into the ring and beating it to death. in the gentlest, most compassionate, funniest possible way. i've lost track of the number of conversations we've had among ourselves as to how-to. secretly i think we all think we're unqualified. puberty, to many of us, for whatever reason or whatever way, = failure and embarassment. but, of course, that's also why we're doing this. we have our own demons to be exorcised, and stressing to a different generation of girlz that the failure and embarassment they'll inevitably encounter is natural and oh-so-common will hopefully convince us all.

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