It happend the same way it usually does; one little girl, who I’m sure is a perfectly sweet child 99% of the time, decided that she would have more fun if she could remove another child from the group that had been playing happily for hours. I was off to the side playing with Smiley when I heard, “We’re going to go play another game in my backyard, and everyone can play except you, Mia.” No beating around the bush, huh? I looked up just in time to see Mia’s face crumple. I’m perfectly willing to admit that Mia may have been bossing everyone around or trying to alienate someone else moments before I overheard that sentence, but that’s immaterial. This behavior is everything I hate about elementary school playgrounds, and I’m not having it.

Apparently I’m not the only one who isn’t having it, because another mother swept in from the next yard over and removed her child from the situation just as I was telling the girls that there were not going to be any games that didn’t include everyone, and just like that, the group broke up into twos and threes and wandered in different directions.

Tulip didn’t immediately empathize with Mia in the way I had assumed she would. She complained that she had really wanted to play the newly proposed game, and when I asked if she would want to play if she was the one left out, she answered that she would have. I was too frazzled to rephrase the question to focus on how Mia must have felt at being left out, but I’m going to work on that today. She’s probably, at some point or another, going to exclude other children for sport, but at the very least, I want her to understand how much I loathe the behavior and how it hurts the one excluded.