Lucky

Just the other day I was talking with a friend of mine from way back in the end. We met due to some sort of middle school rebellion. Me in detention and her forced to clean desks during detention. Any way...we were talking and we got onto the subject of children and the fact that my oldest is just now entering that stage where you do pretty harmless things that are pretty idiotic. The things that we all do because we think we know everything, can get away with anything, and at the end of the day will probably be looked back upon with fondness. I mean really how serious is the eyeliner battle going to seem when she's thirty?


I was different, different than most anyway. Or it seemed that way. I was the kid that was always a bit to loud (still am). I was the kid that constantly got a call home from the teacher. I was the kid who would make everyone laugh but had few true close friends. I was the kid who got sent away to a home by age fifteen, who had her own apartment before graduating high school. Baby three days before my 18th birthday....


So in this conversation we joke about how I just may be cursed with kids who put me through what I put my parents through. She says how she never understood why I always said that my parents were strict or mean because she just loved them!! The few times they met she thought my Dad was hilarious and my Mom so sweet. She just didn't see what I had been saying. I think that's because my Dad is funny, and my Mom is sweet. They are cool and fun and great....but that doesn't mean my life was. That doesn't mean that behind all that real life wasn't happening.That doesn't mean they are bad people but I wasn't standing all alone in that mess. I hadn't  found myself thrust into adolescence with the best tools to thrive and been simply unable to utilize them. I wasn't just a troublemaker, a bad seed.

I was frozen by this conversation. Frozen because even now, years and years later, I still couldn't summon the courage to say what my life was really like. I couldn't tell the truth. So I half heartedly agreed with her and managed a chuckle or two. I was left feeling very disappointed in myself, our conversation, and secretly wishing sometimes I didn't have friends I'd known from way back in the end.