My Tribe…

As a young girl on the playground, I struggled to make friends. I don’t remember a time in elementary school where I have significant memories of sleepovers and friendships. I do remember the relentless teasing because I had/have freckles. The mean girls used to sit on top of the monkey bars and taunt down at me “freckle face, freckle face, no one plays with a freckle face”. I remember coming home crying many days, but those are the days that parents worked full time, and a stay at home mom was a rarity. Even if your Mom stayed at home, she didn’t come “rescue” you from playground taunting. Instead, my dad found the song “Freckles” by the Oakridge boys. He bought the record, (or was it an 8-track?) and he would sing it to me off key, and dance with me around the house. He told me my freckles were like stars in the sky, and beautiful. To this day, I still listen to that song with fond memories. Isn’t my dad pretty awesome?

My Mom was never a “stay at home Mom”. Nor did she care to be. You wouldn’t find her at PTA/PSO meetings, or being a Girl Scout leader. I really wanted Mom to be the leader, but instead I was in a troop with girls who had the stay at home Moms, and the Moms felt sorry for me when my Mom couldn’t show up at the middle of the day or after school events. I remember hearing my Girl Scout leaders talking about my Mom the same way their daughters taunted me on the playground. I remember feeling shame for the first time at those meetings and events. Shame that my Mom had to work.

As I graduated to Jr. High things got slightly better. I continued with Girl Scouts into 7th grade, and then the troop disbanded. It was better that way. After so many years with that same group of girls, they came to be frenimies. I would invite them to my March birthday parties, and they invited me to theirs. My Mom went all out with my parties. Almost making up for the fact that she couldn’t do so many other events. We usually ended the night toilet papering someone’s house in the neighborhood, and Mom usually drove us there.

Jr. High graduated into High School, I made the freshman cheerleading team. When I tried out, I was crying so hard coming out to the car, my Dad said he didn’t know if I had made the team or not. Those girls became my squad, the ones that had my back. I loved cheerleading and finally felt like I had found my people. Then it all changed…

 

The end of my sophomore year, my parents dedcided to put the house on the market and move to Oregon. So I couldn’t try out for cheerleading again, and I was devastated. In reality, I probably could have, since we didn’t move until the middle of my Junior year of High School. We moved from a suburb of San Diego, to….wait for it…Cottage Grove, Oregon. I went from a graduating class of over 800 kids who I had grown up with most of them, to a graduating class of 154 and everyone hated me for being the “new girl”. When I walked through the indoor high school for registration, everyone literally stopped to look and you could hear a pin drop. Not to mention I showed up in a fashion forward DENIM on DENIM, with WHITE appliqué stars jacket and matching jeans. I’m just thankful they didn’t break into song and start singing the National Anthem.

Advanced theatre was where I made my small handful of friends. During my registration I was told I wouldn’t have to perform on the first day. However a kid named Marty, had other ideas. As I sat in the front row of class during improv, from behind me I heard, ” Let’s see what the new girl has to offer.” Never one to shy away from a challenge, I got on stage with a kid named David, who had this one long strand of hair in his face, but all his other hair was short. It was weird. I don’t remember what I did during that session, but after, I had won favor amongst my class mates and the confidence to try out for the school play.

I auditioned for the school play, and took a leading role as Jessica, in the play “The Tim Machiene”. It was during that play that I met my boyfriend, the preachers son. Also, another guy that would be important in my life, my husband.

School was pretty uneventful and the coursework was less than challenging. I remember begging my parents to allow me to take the GED and get on with my life, but they didn’t. So I suffered through a curriculum that I had already done my Freshman year at my old school. I barely graduated, due to a physics teacher who wasn’t impressed with my lack of gravity. He pulled me outside the classroom and told me, “You’re too smart to have to take this class again, and I know it’s the only one you need for your diploma, so you’re getting a D so you can graduate”. I didn’t believe him and was shocked when the diploma was actually in the cover after I walked across the stage.

Graduation was surreal, I went on to a community college until I ran out of money, and then worked numerous jobs hoping to get back to college “one day” and become a teacher just like my beloved grandma who passed on in 1991. Aside form completing an internship with Disneyland in the merchandising department (aka-Main Street USA) I never went back to college.

Instead, my early twenties were a blur of bad mistakes. Remember the kid who put me onstage that first day at the new high school? He’s now my husband of almost 20 years. My mid twenties, were some of the best and most challenging times of my life being a new wife and a new Mom. I had never felt so alone in Motherhood, until I met Tiffany at a scrapbooking and photography class. She told me about the MOMS CLUB, and I finally found my tribe.

To be continued…