How late is too late for me to reconcile with the Girl Scouts?
The big event in my life right now is the arrival of my daughter, Jane, before whose coming I wasn’t sure about wanting a daughter. I didn’t know if I wanted a girl because I know what it’s like growing up as a girl. Tina Fey didn’t cast Lindsay Lohan and thus net herself $86 million by not striking a chord.
Before my daughter, we had our son, and now having the two of them has me thinking about differences in the way they’ll be raised and differences in the way my brother and I were.
For one thing, he was in Boy Scouts. I was not.
In fairness, I was never pushed in the direction of Girl Scouts. I asked my parents if I could join a troop, and you can bet I had one in mind. The one I wanted was led by two third-grade girls named Candice and Jaimie. Rather, it was led by their mothers, or then-Candice and Jaimie in 30 years’ time. It says something that my idea of a cool girl was someone who vowed to uphold the spirit of the community by cross-stitching for hospitals and selling coconut baked goods. It says something further that I could not fit in with these girls, no matter how many crosses I stitched.
As anywhere, the Girls Scouts had its own hierarchy, not an entirely backward one. Candice, for instance, was named Candice. But she had hair like a stallion plus her own backyard and underground pool, and she knew it. When our troop went on retreats with other troops, I remember feeling left out for not knowing all the lyrics to songs about not ever having to feel left out. Candice always seemed to have a good time.
I won’t mercilessly slam Girl Scouts for giving me nothing and selling me out as cookie salesperson in return. I actually didn’t mind selling the cookies; I managed to locate an unspoken-for cul-de-sac where I reigned as most-popular preteenager for a single month every year.
For a while there, Girl Scout-wise, I did OK. I was by no means popular, but I had a by-name affiliation with Candice and Candice’s pool. And I was a big hit in my cul-de-sac and with my mom’s co-workers. By and large, I started managing to avoid the retreats.
Then I made a big mistake. I edged out Jaimie for the lead in a play we were putting on for our parents in a Manassas church basement. After that things weren’t ever really the same. I don’t think the play ever went to production, but the troop atmosphere took a turn when our leader—Jaimie’s mother, mind you—announced the results of the audition. And not to put too fine a point on it, but before that announcement Jaimie’s mom asked us if we were all sure we didn’t want to have a re-do the next week, since that way everybody could have some time to better prepare themselves.
Suffice it to say I, an American girl, didn’t hit it off big with the organization that markets itself as the emblem of the all-American girl. My friend Laura tells me there are exceptions, that she loved Girl Scouts so much she wanted to keep doing it in college, and that there are nut jobs out there who actually do. She says her troop did cool stuff, like having cookouts and going camping, and I will admit my troop did that once. We spent two nights in the Shenandoah National Park, where the rafters of our cabin were crawling with so many bugs that when we shined a flashlight on them one of the girls threw up in her sleeping bag.
Back at the farm, my dad led my brother’s Cub Scouts troop, and they actually did do cool stuff that I witnessed firsthand while not getting to do any of it. Tell me: How do I, a 31-year-old woman with no child of appropriate age, earn permission to participate in the Cub Scouts’ annual Pinewood Derby? Because it is the bomb. In case you’re not a frequenter of elementary-school multipurpose rooms, the Pinewood Derby is where the Cub Scouts set up a track and race wooden cars that they’ve bedazzled to look like sharks and strips of bacon. OK, so admittedly every month wasn’t like this, and I remember my dad devoting a lot of time trying to teach the ADD kid how to use a compass, but Derby beats cookies any day of the week.
Lately, all of this has me wondering about extracurricular activities for my kids. What happens on the day my daughter tells me she wants to run off with Candice and Jaimie—sorry, Candice’s and Jaimie’s daughters—in a Brownies beret and that I have to stay back to sew the badges onto her vest? Is that the time to tell her I couldn’t sew a badge to save either her life or my own, that the Girl Scouts let me down on the sewing front as well as so many others?
I suppose that if she is going to join, I at least want there to be some ground rules, and the best way so far as I can see to implement any of them is to dive ahead of the curve and volunteer to be troop leader.
If that sounds like helicopter parenting, that’s because it is helicopter parenting, exactly.
But here’s what I don’t want to have happen one day. I don’t want my daughter to come wailing to me because Jaimie’s kid earned her braids badge and Candice’s made up a brand-new badge—one that her mom said was OK—for throwing a party at her backyard pool. We’re not braids people, my family. If Jane’s joining Girl Scouts, I don’t want the highlight of her experience there to be standing outside Walmart, in the wintertime, asking strangers for money, none of which she gets to keep.
Maybe instead I could give her the experience my friend Laura had. Maybe I could learn to camp and take all the girls camping, outfitted with spray tanks of Off! and tents with bug netting. Maybe we organize and host our own derby, multipurpose rooms being not so hard to come by, and design wooden cars with twice the length and speed as the Cub Scouts’. Maybe we institute a policy that whoever gets lead in the play earned it fair and square and won’t experience negative repercussions for her success, albeit a small one, but big enough in the eyes of third-graders. And maybe we start out by agreeing that yes, we’ll serve “God and our country,” whatever that so happens to mean for us individually, but that also there really isn’t cause to feel left out, whether you know our song lyrics or not.
Yeah. I could hawk cookies for that.
As I was writing this, I asked my husband if he’d ever consider being our son’s Boy Scouts leader. He said yes, on the condition that he can Google the badges the night before leading the activities earning them badges.
I told him that is fair, and that I don’t actually know how to camp out and would be relying heavily on my phone’s 3G connection that first night my troop finds itself in the woods. It’s a hairline crack in my plan, but no one will notice if I bring along enough cookies, and everyone gets the same number of cookies.
Not even one tiny extra cookie for Jane, who, by the way, is bunking with me.