Betsy Joined a Gang

Newsletter 2023-12-04

I thought I had a few more years before I needed to worry about this, but I was wrong. My thirteen-year-old joined a gang. Betsy has fallen in with a rough and tumble bunch that stays up into the wee hours of the morning, making trouble in other people’s houses. Worse, she takes pictures of their shenanigans and eagerly shows them off afterwards. She doesn’t understand that the first rule of a crime spree is don’t preserve the evidence. The public education system really let her down. Every time she comes back from a gang hangout, she’s exhausted but exhilarated and can’t wait to do it again. There’s no stopping her and her crew. Apparently, this is what it’s like to have friends.

Betsy and her pals don’t attend biker gang rallies or do drive-bys. Instead, their thing is sleepovers. The group of five best friends spend the night at each other’s houses depending on whose birthday it is. All of them attend each one. As soon as they get together, noise ordinances are flouted and bedtimes are disregarded with utter contempt. They see hours on the clock I never even made it to when I pulled “all-nighters” back in college. I have no idea how the girls have that much energy, but it might have something to do with all the sugar. Betsy told me that she had doughnuts, birthday cake, and ice cream for breakfast with her gang Saturday morning. Maybe it’s not too late for me to join.

I’m actually thrilled that Betsy has such a tight group of friends. They seem like good kids. I have to speak in generalities here because I barely know any of them, despite the fact that Betsy talks about them all the time. The problem is her stories contain lots of girl names ending in y. These kids are all the same height, have the same hair color, and wear similar clothes. Sometimes after sleepovers I’m not entirely sure I’m coming home with the right kid. I mostly see Betsy’s friends at pick-up or drop-off times, including on the glorious occasions when one of those kids shows up at my door with their parents to handle rides in both directions. Anyone who takes extra steps to make sure I don’t have to leave the house is my friend for life. Despite these kind gestures, I still don’t know anybody’s name, not that it would be hard to guess them. If you call any middle school girl in the country “Emma,” you have a fifty percent chance of being right. I don’t have any room to complain about common names. While I use pseudonyms on the internet for my kids to make them harder to kidnap, their real identities are disappointingly basic. In my first twenty years of life, I only knew one kid with Betsy’s real name. Now, it’s almost as popular as “Emma.” As for my eleven-year-old, Mae, I’d never known anyone at all with her real name. Now, there’s a celebrity kid with the same moniker, making Mae’s real name about as exotic as “Bob” or “John.” The moral of the story is that naming girls is hard, which is why my wife and I stopped having kids. History proves I’m only capable of producing daughters, and we’ve already used up all the girl names we like. If we expanded beyond our current squad, we’d have to start naming kids after states. Nobody wants to be called the female form of Rhode Island. Actually, Rhode Island likely is the female version. The male form would be Rod Island.

Betsy feels insulted that I don’t know the names and faces of her best friends, but look at it from my point of view. I don’t just have to memorize her friend group, which only recently stabilized. (Before this, there was a rotating cast of characters who could be her friends or enemies depending on the day of the week or even time of day.) I also have to remember the names for my other three daughters’ social circles, which would be fifty or sixty kids total. If they expect me to keep up with who’s who, they need to pick one best friend, which is supposed to be what “best” means. There shouldn’t be a four-way tie for first place. Also, I would have to see these kids for more than thirty seconds at a time. That isn’t going to happen. Betsy’s gang has now established that full-group birthday sleepovers are mandatory. So far, everyone else has held up their end of the bargain. Not us. My house can’t handle that many additional girls. Neither can my sanity.

Betsy isn’t a different person around her friends, but she’s definitely an exaggerated version of herself. She’s like me after I’ve had two beers. (The actual number of drinks I need to reach that state is unknown since, as a wise married man, I always stop counting after two.) To be clear, all the kids are completely sober at these sleepovers. Betsy’s friends just bring out the most outgoing side of her, which is saying something since she’s not exactly a wallflower to begin with. As soon as she’s in the same room with one of her friends, her volume triples and her energy level skyrockets. It’s like she mainlined Pixy Stix directly into her bloodstream. The level of enthusiasm is, quite frankly, intimidating. When I arrive at some other parent’s house to retrieve her, the first thing I want to do is run away. I have no idea how those other moms and dads handle it. They must use the same kind of ear protection recommended at rifle ranges. Either that or their eardrums have already been blown out by prior sleepovers. In that case, I’m justified in not hosting one. They should always be thrown by someone who has already suffered auditory collateral damage. Every party is a quiet party for them.

The girls manage to make a lot of noise doing activities most other people would consider mundane. The rest of us must be doing it wrong. At one sleepover, Betsy thrilled her besties by showing up with costume onesies for everyone to wear throughout the night. We’ve amassed quite a collection from previous Halloweens. We have ones patterned like minions, Batman, and a whole string of animals. I’m not sure what would generate a similar amount of excitement at an adult party. Maybe showing up with cocaine and fireworks. Another girl returned the favor by buying matching pajama pants for everyone to wear at the next sleepover. They take this theme stuff very seriously. Once the girls are sufficiently cozy, they watch horror movies into the early hours of the morning. The fake danger keeps them awake. Their periodic screaming keeps everyone else in the neighborhood up, too. On her own, Betsy is what, in scientific terms, is known as a giant chicken. All of my kids are. They refuse to go into the basement alone and are deathly afraid of spiders. We’ve had to turn off various episodes of Star Trek because they were too scary. Now, Betsy watches teens get murdered by masked figures on a weekly basis. Peer pressure makes her bold, or maybe she was just bolstered by her outfit. The dark seems a lot less frightening when you’re wrapped up in the world’s warmest onesie.

Photo by m wrona on Unsplash

I never attended slumber parties that elaborate when I was a kid. Most sleepovers only had one or two other friends. Back then, parents had less patience and more sense. I grew up as one of seven kids, although for most of my childhood, there were five. My mom would have been insane to let more people into our house. I made up for that in later years by inviting them over myself. When I was home for the summer during college, I summoned thirteen other people who, with two of my brothers plus myself, filled out our sixteen-player Halo LAN parties. We all crammed into two small rooms upstairs, with half of us being in closets. Even now, my mom can’t get the smell out. I can’t imagine what I would do if Betsy showed up at my house with that many people. I’d be terrified, unless they were here to play Halo. Then it would be the greatest night of my life.

I’m curious to see how long Betsy’s gang holds together. The bonds of friendship in her life seem firmer now that she knows who she is and what she wants from life. Maybe this group of five will be each other’s entire bridal parties someday. That outcome is definitely against the odds. I only maintain regular contact with one or two people I knew in middle school. One is a guy I met in third grade but lost touch with for years until we reconnected as adults. Now we play online board games together every day to help each other procrastinate. Friends help friends not get anything done. Everyone else from my childhood is basically a ghost. Most of my close friends from back then don’t even come back for reunions. In high school, we didn’t do sleepovers, but we did drive in endless circles around our town late at night. That was literally our highest form of entertainment. No wonder they don’t want to hang out with me now. Trauma from that kind of lethal boredom lasts a lifetime.

I should be grateful Betsy is currently at a younger, less mobile age. She and her friends still think it’s cool to crash in sleeping bags on the living room floor with both parents in the house. It’s hard to get in too much trouble that way, besides occasionally making enough noise to register as a local earthquake. It’s also pretty affordable. They live on pizza and grocery store cake, with the occasional outing to someplace fancy like a bowling alley. There is the odd exception, though. One mom took the girls out for authentic ramen, which is why Betsy now requests to go to a Japanese steakhouse for her family birthday dinners. I was a lot happier when she thought the finest dining in the world could be found at McDonald’s. Outside of that, these sleepovers are pretty cheap. Since we’re not hosting, the only real cost to us is the price of the gifts. Every time Betsy announces that she has yet another all-hands overnight outing, we have to find time in the week to head to Walmart and pick up whatever it is teenage girls are into these days. We’ve become very acquainted with the makeup and arts and crafts aisles. These kids are out of control.

As nice as it’s been to let Betsy freeload off other families’ generosity, I can see the writing on the wall. If every single one of Betsy’s friends invites her over for a full-group sleepover, we’ll eventually be forced to reciprocate. Maybe we can arrange for it to be on the same weekend that some of our other kids are at other people’s houses. It’s the only way to avoid violating the fire code. That might also help us keep the volume down. If teenage girls aren’t exactly quiet under normal party conditions, they’re absolutely earth-shaking when a younger sibling butts in on their fun. I guarantee you that all of my other daughters would try to insert themselves whenever Betsy and her friends most wanted to be left alone. It’s the sibling code. Maybe I can convince Betsy’s crew that the best way to have fun is to do a campout in the backyard away from the rest of the family. That sounds like the perfect solution as long as I don’t have to get my own tent and camp out, too. If that happens, all birthdays are canceled forever.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James