So, I've been trying to come up with something to write about... for the last month.
yeah, talk about writer's block.
well soccer started up again, which is awesome. this season is interesting because the program is co-ed [meaning boys and girls play on the same teams], I have never played co-ed before. I have always wanted to try it, just because girls and boys play in completely different styles and I think it would be fun to learn how to play with different techniques.
Last year my team scrimmaged a boys team and we did really bad, we could NOT figure out their style! Yes, us 13 year-old girls lost to 10 year-old boys, yikes!
Apparently here, they struggle to keep the girls in the league. I'm not sure why, but there are very few girls. I'm one of two girls on my team ( I am soooo thankful there is another girl! i'm not alone!), and then there's the 10 other boys! We are way out numbered. Which is fine, i grew up around boys my age, so hopefully they will just treat me like one of the other guys.
I had a point for saying this... okay! i got it!
Something i feel is lost in our culture is the friendship between genders.
As a elementary aged kid, i struggled to be friends with girls. Simply because of the gossip and rumors. The few years I went to public school, I never understood it when at recess the girls would sit at the tables and talk and tell the latest gossip. I thought recess was to get spare energy out and play!
So you know what I did, I played Spies with the boys. We would run around and pretend to fight invisible bad guys and we had a "secret" base at the hand-ball courts. The wood chips were lava and the swings were our spaceships. How much more fun can it get? A bunch of clueless first graders saving their own little world called the playground. I didn't and still don't see anything wrong with that.
Brace yourselves, here comes the sad part. I got teased so badly for this by the girls I thought were my friends. They told me, "I was weird and crazy for playing with the boys, because boys are gross". When I shook this off, they started spreading a rumor that I 'liked' one of these guys! COME ON! We were in first grade for crying out loud! I felt devastated and betrayed. I remember coming home from school and I feeling like crying.
Still to this day I am effected by that fiasco, but not in the way you might expect. Instead of backing away and not being friends with boys, I decided to prove my point. Every new place I went I always was friends with guys, even now one of my best friends is a boy. The last place I lived, I had this awesome group of friends, with girls and boys combined. We had a few unspoken rules, No stupid drama, No gossip, No friends one day and worst enemies the next. They were people we could rely on to give us a hand and some encouragement.
What good are we doing ourselves by segregating the genders? Sure there's a time and place for only girls or only guys, of course there is. But if we can't just be friends with the other gender, how far can we go in life? This could hurt our futures in so many ways with work, dating, ministry, marriage, and just everyday life. The ability to understand how the other gender thinks is so vital.
I might be completely wrong or missing something, feel free to share your ideas. But I created this blog for the reason of sharing my ideas.
This is just some food for thought.
Bon appétit!