When I was about 8/9 years old I was told by a friend of mine I couldn’t play with them any more. Their mother didn’t approve of it for some reason.
One year later I asked my mom if she ever knew why this was the case. She said that other mother thought I wasn’t good enough for her child. But that after a while that mother said she may be okay with it now.
But my mother said she didn’t like that idea. That this friendship would be all reliant on that mother’s “generosity”. And I didn’t feel the need to object to that. My mom’s reasoning made perfect sense to me, even on age 10. This was not the way you treat friendships fairly from a parents perspective, I realised. (There is a little more to this story though, but this is all I care to share.)
I still feel like that was a mature thing I did. Because I was not a child that took ‘no’ very well at that age. So what are your childhood experiences where, now upon looking back, you feel you handled it maturely?
Not that it was remarkably maturely, but I think that it’s funny, so:
I’m maybe, I dunno, 5. The family goes to a theme park that has this ball pit. Little kids can swim around in them. I’m waiting in line and this group shows up sporadically, spread out over the line. Everyone in the group is somewhere in front of me in line except this one little girl, who is right behind me. They hit the maximum number of kids in the ball pool right as I go in, and the attendant says to the little girl “no, sorry, we can’t have any more, you have to wait for the next batch” and she starts to cry. I say “let her go ahead, and I’ll wait for the next batch”. The ball pool attendant, who didn’t want to deal with some hysterical little kid, says to me, “Thanks, kid. Here, you want to say something on the loudspeaker?” and without waiting a sec, sticks the microphone right in my face and keys it. I didn’t, in fact, want to say anything on the loudspeaker, and say “No”, which of course comes out hugely amplified over the ride’s sound system. Every kid in the ball pool looks up petrified, trying to figure out what they just did wrong.
