I spent most of my childhood thinking that one day, if I did everything right, I might just be able to Fit In. Normal never applied to me but I saw that as an embarrassment. Fitting In was the goal.
I will just say right here and now that I never Fit In.
When we moved from Augusta to Knoxville in 1971 I was in the third grade and I was put into a classroom of really smart kids, all of whom were on the accelerated track. Keeping up in school was scary. I didn't know my multiplication tables yet. I didn't wear cute hair ribbons. The other kids said "You talk funny!"
I was painfully shy in school. At home, I wasn't shy at all. In fact, I was a Hot Mess -- talking, yelling, asking a million questions, jumping on beds and turning cartwheels and demanding my brother play with me and mama teach me to cook.
I was also extremely independent and stubborn.
Mom said she offered to potty train me when I was 2 or 3, and I refused, saying "Show me what to do and I will train myself." She put a stack of panties in my room, explained what to do, and I actually did train myself. My father used to laugh and say my favorite phrase was "I'D RATHER DO IT MYSELF!"
I did not ever want to be obedient and go along with what everyone wanted me to do, but my parents usually got me to behave.
School was a foreign place, however. School was a place where my personality scared the other kids. My size scared them. They didn't know what to make of me, I'm sure.
I would have thrived in a Montessori school, where I could learn at my own pace. Unfortunately, Dad didn't go along with that idea, probably for financial reasons.
"Normal" kids actually scared me into shyness because I must have sensed that I was not normal. I wasn't ever destined to Fit In. The fact that I grew very fast from birth to age 10 was problematic. I was always taller than the other kids, and chubby. I always looked like a kid that had been held back and was older than the other kids. I looked out of place.
Left - photos made shortly after we moved into our house in Knoxville.
Many years would pass before I would realize that the fact that I didn't fit in was actually a blessing. It forced me to entertain myself, and the way I did that was by becoming a voracious reader. Books were my ticket out of my mundane (and often uncomfortable) life. I had a lot of good influences pushing me towards books. Both my parents loved to read. My brother loved to read.
Finding good books to read was the family obsession. I remember going to the library and getting grocery sacks full of books so that everyone would have something to read for the next week. I read the entire children's section of the Appleby Branch Library in Augusta and the Farragut branch library in Knoxville.
The fact that I always had my nose in a book didn't endear me to my peers, however. In fact, I'm sure they thought I was just weird.
I made no close friends in 3rd or 4th grades. In 5th grade I finally made one friend at school, and we were friends all through middle school. Then in 10th grade my friend became obsessed with boys and I didn't, and we had a big fight and that ended our friendship. My friend had only a sister, and she had no idea what boys were really like. I tried to explain to her how mean and dirty and weird boys were, how icky it was to share a bathroom with my brother, etc. and she just thought I was weird. [And no, I'm not gay.]
Teenage hormones are wicked. I had them as bad as anyone else, but I trained myself to bury myself in books and ignore anything unpleasant. Unlike some of my peers I wasn't prancing around in short shorts and high-heeled Candies, looking for a date. I also wasn't the opposite, a Christian Kid -- a member of Young Life. I didn't go to the ginormous Presbyterian church in Knoxville where are the popular kids attended. Talking about Jesus and being "saved" made me really uncomfortable because that wasn't done in my church, the Episcopal Church.
I say all this to demonstrate that we need to identify and nurture kids who don't Fit In, and get them around peers who are on their same intellectual and emotional level. I was really smart and most of my peers were just normal kids. Some were smart, like me, but the girls usually didn't let on. Girls are taught early not to appear to be smarter than boys. I can remember my grandmother telling me to let boys win sometimes when we played games. They never let me win at kickball or 4 square, so why should I play dumb and let them win, I wondered? Besides, I enjoyed beating them at games.
I remember in 6th grade there was a core group of super smart kids that were always singled out by my social studies teacher, and I longed to be in that group. They were all boys. We would play games in class and I would almost beat those smart boys but usually they clobbered me. One of those boys went on to become a doctor and two of them became engineers, just FYI.
If I had been able to take advanced classes that would have been great. I never qualified for those in high school because I am terrible at taking standardized tests. Huge test anxiety. I also suck at math. True Nerds and Geeks are usually good at all subjects. Not me.
So I didn't fit in with the "normal" kids and I couldn't get into the Geeky subgroups of Really Smart Kids. Most of the Geeky boys wanted nothing to do with me, probably because they were distracted by my enormous boobs. Additionally, I was short and chubby. In high school, suddenly all the kids had hit growth spurts and I had stopped growing, so I was short.
There's another issue. If you are a short woman with big boobs nobody is going to look at you and think you have a very high IQ. Add to that a name ["Dee"] which sounds like a nickname, or the name of a very old cashier at the Piggly Wiggly, and the chances of Fitting In dwindle to zero. For a while in elementary school I asked people to call me "Cordelia" -- the name of the grandmother who I was named for -- but that wasn't my ticket to social stardom. The other kids just thought it was weird. They also didn't understand that my name "Dee" was a diminutive of hers. That phase didn't last long.
There were days when I desperately wished my name were something normal like Susan, Karen, Kimberly, or Amy.
left - me in about 4th grade, already with boobs
I'm also pretty sure some of the girls in high school were jealous of my rack.
Some boys were quite rude about the boobage. A cute boy on the swim team who had never spoken to me before sat next to me on the bus going to a swim meet one day and told me a knock knock joke.
"Knock knock" he said to me.
"Who's there?" I answered casually, trying to hide my excitement that he would actually speak to me.
"Emerson," he responded, grinning.
"Emerson who?" I answered.
"Emerson big boobs you got there!" he chortled.
I was astounded by that sort of crudeness, and angry that he didn't see any of my smartness, or talent at swimming or singing or writing. Nope, he just saw boobs.
I think today it's a lot easier to be outside the norm. Kids today might wear earrings in their eyebrows or clothes that don't match and not suffer socially because of it.
Here's to all of us who didn't Fit In, whether because of being bigger than our peers, or smarter, or having bigger boobs, or for whatever reason. We can still lead happy lives, and find other misfits to hang out with. I'm living proof...
