Dear Fellow Fifth Grade Moms,

Ive been wanting to talk to you for a long time.

Ive had questions about whether or not you allow your girls to use certain apps, how you plan to talk to them about sex, what you think about academic achievement and homework, and how you think we can best protect our daughters from pressures (to be sexual, to drink, to try drugs) during junior high.

But right now I want to talk with you about something that feels even more pressing: their friendships, and how they treat each other.

This is a dark time for women, or perhaps more accurately its been a dark time for women and girls for a long time, and we thought things were getting better and they havent, they arent, or at least not enough.

And there are all kinds of things we need to do to make this right. We could march, and support Planned Parenthood , and mentor girls who need help, and contact our politicians, and be vocal on social media. And we should. But we also need to start in our own families, with our own children.

Our daughters are fantastic. They are all good, kind people. They are feisty and impassioned and radiant and funny. And they are trying like hell to navigate through this s**tshow of a culture we have given them. They are trying to find their place, their voices, their self-worth.

And sometimes they are not allies to one another.

This is not their fault. This is what we have given them to work with. Or rather, what we havent given them. They have no tools.

On the playground, one of them dares to talk with another child, so the three remaining form a club with a ridiculous name and inform her she is not allowed to be part of it. They say to each other, If you dont do this, then I wont let you ...

And so it goes; the same dynamic plays out in a variety of unique circumstances day after day. Youre out, youre in. You choose someone else, you are banished. They arent bullying, they arent overtly cruel, its subtle.

This is not a new problem; this is how we solved problems on the playground in the 1980s, and likely well before then. This is why I felt like I never truly belonged, not until perhaps I was nearly finished with college. I always felt as though I were looking for a table in the cafeteria in 7th grade is there a fresher hell than that?