Someday I'll Grow Up, but Obviously not Today

Remember as a kid, you’d look to adulthood and tell yourself, it’ll all be better when I’m grown up? Yeah, kids are stupid. When I was a kid, I remember thinking there would be a day when other people’s slights wouldn’t have such a guttural effect on me. That big punch in the stomach when you realize you’re the odd man out, that hit that let’s you know you’re in it alone and it wasn’t your choice.

When I was five, I took a little gymnastics class. We were learning to walk the low balance beam, waiting in a wiggly line against the wall for the teacher to call us up for our turns. I waited with as much patience as I could muster, watching the other kids and thinking, this I can do! I wasn’t so good a gymnastics, but I was going to master that low beam. The teacher called kid after kid, and before long everyone had gone except for me. I knew I was next. The butterflies shimmied around in my tummy and I thought I might pee myself with excitement. I even took that little anticipatory step forward. It was my turn at last. And then, the teacher clapped her hands together and told us it was time to move on to the low bars. No turn for me. Now I’m sure that teacher didn’t mean to slight me, but I was five and it sure felt like it. I held my tears until I got in the car and cried the whole drive home.

It hurt just as much in middle school when I wasn’t aloud to sit at a certain lunch table. Or in high school when I overheard a boy in physics class convince his friend not to ask me to the homecoming dance by saying, “She doesn’t belong in our group.” Or every single time a teacher in college would tell us to find a partner in a class full of strangers. The older I got, fitting in just never seemed to get any easier.

So as an adult, the mother of two, deeply entrenched in the thirty-something life, facing forty “someday” as the character Sally from When Harry Met Sally (hey, I fully admitted I was thirty-something) so accurately wept, you’d think I’d toughen up and learn to let it slide. Chances are people don’t mean to be mean. Chances are. But every time it happens, I get the wind knocked out of me. In the end, I guess I have to be thankful for that winded, hollow feeling that helps me remember what it feels like to be young and stupid. Perhaps that’s why all those teenage voices come to me and whisper their stories in my ears. They know I get it. They know I feel it. Deep in my gut. I feel it, just like I did when I was five or thirteen or sixteen or twenty or thirty-something.

photo by Margarit Ralev, Sofia, Bulgaria