As I was standing in one of the makeup aisles at Meijer (I was supposed to be there for groceries) I listened to an overly loud and dramatic conversation I could hear from where I was standing as clearly as if I were a part of it. Much to Abby’s horror Brandon hadn’t asked her to prom yet, and she was frantically trying to appear not frantic in her attempt to get asked by anyone at this point, even Zack the weird guy in her Algebra 2 class.
I smirked – I couldn’t control it – and refocused on the task at hand, which was finding a mascara that would make my lashes look like a girl’s in my creative non-fiction writing class because I was sure my husband would finally notice, if only I had those lashes! I was currently staring at a picture of Gwen Stefani and ten types of “volumous, lash-boosting power,” as opposed to filling my cart with the groceries we desperately needed (old mother’s cupboard had taken on a new meaning for us).
I got bored pretty quickly and grabbed the shiny gold container because it was pretty and caught my eye, and headed to the other side of the store to fulfill my “womanly” obligations. Aisle after aisle I walked, filling my cart with items from my list, when I walked down the cookie/cracker/soup aisle and saw the Chef Boyardee products. Now, I have no fear any of the amazing mothers in my mom’s group will ever find out that I’m a fraud (unless you tell them) because Chef Boyardee saved my children from certain starvation this week, and they would be shocked to find that someone has infiltrated their group who doesn’t go out back and hand-pick the ingredients from their organic gardens for every meal. They will never read this and find out because let’s face it – I am not Alicia Silverstone mouth-feeding my baby, or a “breast feeding mom”, or a “cloth swaddler” or a “backpack baby-wearing mom” and am in no fashion liberal or chic enough to warrant their attention. Having considered all that I picked up four various whole- wheat Chef Boyardee products and added it to the other processed poisons in the cart, and made my way to the – gasp – pasteurized cow milk!
Shuffling my way to aisle twelve I had to swerve around an old lady in a motorized wheel chair, and play chicken with a woman to get to the cereal which is even worse than trying to pick mascara. My eyes glazed over as Count Chocula, Tony the tiger and the Cheerios bee, each seemed to be calling my name, when I am suddenly acutely aware of the woman sashaying behind me with “juicy” written across the ass of her pink pants. I think at that moment my mouth actually fell open because this woman was like a living Barbie doll. Her blond hair was pulled up into a sleek ponytail without those little flyaway hairs normal women get, she had makeup on at nine am on a Saturday, and her outfit was skintight. The cart she was pushing was full of all-natural, healthy food and the baby in the car seat was asleep and perfectly adorable. She was then joined by two other women that were also perfectly coifed and ridiculously cute and I immediately hated them and wanted to be their friend at the same time. One caught me staring and flipped her hair before turning around and the Barbie trio sauntered away toward the organic granola.
After I finished and made my way to the checkout I pulled out my coupons and sorted them. I heard a few low voices behind me and turned around to see the trio watching me. They had paused at the magazine selection at the end of my check-out line. They got quiet and Barbie grabbed the nearest People, looked at my stack of coupons, took in my flawed-skin and wrinkled over-sized tee and they walked away.
In kindergarten and first grade my circle of friends changed so drastically that nobody was the same from one year to the next. I remember playing at Stephanie’s house one afternoon, and only one afternoon. She was always really nice to everyone, and her mother was the same. I never went back over to her house, and we were never really friends after that, though nothing had really happened to cause that. She became the not-really-nerdy-but-still-the-smartest girl in our grade and I believe she was top of the class. Of course at Southeastern high school – Go Trojans! – that meant being the top of a class of around sixty, and that’s being generous, not that I want to make her accomplishment sound unworthy of a pat on the back and a hearty “you go girl!”
Let me fast-forward to my sophomore year of high school when I decided to move in with my father and his girlfriend (now wife). I had literally gone to kindergarten with all of these same kids with the exception of a few. I was leaving them all for a new group of people at Northwestern high school where my dad’s girlfriend’s family attended, so I had a shot of knowing at least one person on my first day of the second semester of my awful sophomore year.
My junior and senior years were much better. I went to a vocational school and was in the medical assisting program, I had a lot of friends scattered throughout other various programs, none of which I’m friends with today if that tells you how deep these friendships really were. I suspect it was because I had a car, but let’s change the subject so I can stop thinking about that so my paranoia about being the “place-holder” friend doesn’t come rearing its ugly head. You know what I’m talking about – the person you call when all your other friends are busy or unavailable. Anyway, I tried really hard to be nice to everyone but at some point I just decided it wasn’t my “thing” and became the bitchy girl who was smarter than everyone else and knew it. I gave the answers when I knew them, excelled in all of my classes, and flaunted around like I owned the place. I acted like I didn’t care what the two stick figure girls who aspired to be models in the class were chortling about, and I damn sure didn’t care about what the two teen moms thought because frankly, they must not have brains to begin with if they let themselves get knocked up while they were in high school, right? By the end of my senior year, it was three girls with either a baby or baby-to-be bump peeking out from under our scrubs; yes I said “our” – because I was four months pregnant when I graduated in May 2001.
I remember sitting in government class with the two other teen moms. I had only told a few people that I was pregnant, but they were sitting right beside me coloring cute little pages with bears and baby carriages for their future baby books, while they were waiting on everyone else to finish the latest exam over the counties in Ohio.
“Could I have one of your pages?” Kristie looked at me.
“I guess, but they’re for a baby scrapbook.”
“I know… I’m pregnant.” They looked at each other across the table and Kristie slid a few pages toward me and shared her crayons. It was as close as I got to bonding with these girls. We chatted about baby names and OB/GYN appointments, but we were never close.
Trying to be accepted as a pregnant teen in high school wasn’t really that bad for me since I graduated before I got really big, and the friends I had remained so until graduation. Trying to fit into college as an eighteen year old single mother, who had gained almost 100 pounds during her pregnancy and had a difficult time squeezing into those awful tiny desks they still torture us with in my university (yes, I’m talking about you, Wright State! For the love of the god’s please go to Target and buy some cheap plastic folding tables and chairs for $39 and get those teeny desks out of Fawcett Hall), now that is a challenge that I had no choice but to accept. I didn’t really have a ton of friends for the first few years of my son’s life, and the ones I had were mainly co-workers or guys, and I know why they were trying to be friends with me. Guys I hate to break it to you – not every young single mother is looking to get laid even if you are incredibly hot and offer to have your little sister babysit for an hour.
Okay, so here I am today; a young-ish married mother of three desperately trying to graduate before the university changes from quarters to semesters, writing this essay hoping you as my peers will like it and maybe get a chuckle or two out of it. So you see? Even as adults the acceptance of …well everyone, often defines us and how we see ourselves; I mean if we’re not accepted then that tells us there’s something wrong with us. We must smell funny or look funny, perhaps we have a funny mole we aren’t aware of that we can’t see but everyone else can. Regardless of how hard you try, it’s impossible not to care what those around you think. By the way, you have something green between your teeth.
I just can’t figure out why it matters so much, but I even catch myself trying really hard to help my son Mason fit in at his school. I buy stylish clothes as much as he hates to wear them (luckily he wears a uniform to school), I make him take a shower and clip his nails, because when he does it himself he either cuts them into points so he can kill zombies or he cuts them so short he whines for the next three days about how bad his finger hurts.
The last time this happened, we were arguing about why he was wearing camo pants with a Shrek shirt and rain boots to go outside and play in the ninety-degree summer heat.
“Go change, you look ridiculous.”
“Mom I want to play zombie hunter! I have to wear camo or the zombies will see me.”
“Mason I promise you that the zombies won’t run after you, they will run away because of how horrible that outfit is.”
Insert eye rolling, heavy sighing and pouting for three hours after I made him change into shorts. I gave a little – they were camo shorts. But I threw those God-awful boots out!
I remind him every day to be nice to everyone to which he rolls his eyes and says he knows. I reassure him when he gets into the car after school that yes Victoria actually does like him, she just doesn’t want him to know it because she wrote “love, Victoria” on everyone’s valentine but his, which was signed “Victoria.”
I also worry incessantly if my daughter Amelia is going to cope well in preschool this fall. What if she freaks out at being without me and then nobody wants to play with her? What if she has a potty accident at school? It’s never ending. The only one I don’t worry about is Claire my youngest. She’s full of piss and vinegar and I know she’s destined to be the popular girl that everyone loves…I hope. Maybe I’m just projecting my own insecurities onto my children, who at this age like everyone and are just happy to have someone to play with.
A few days ago, as we were driving home and I had already begun to write this essay Mason and I were talking about his friends at school. I had to laugh because that day he and some boy decided they weren’t friends, but yesterday he told me about their game of tag together during recess. It reminded me of my friendships with Stephanie and other girls throughout middle and high school. I guess it’s normal at his age to change friends like underwear or dirty socks.
Speaking of underwear, I was sitting at Tumbleweed yesterday having lunch with my family, and I glance at my son who is staring off to my left. I look over my shoulder and don’t notice anything right away, but when I look back at him he’s laughing to himself until he realizes that I’m watching him.
“What?”
“What’s so funny?”
“What are you talking about mom?” Uh-huh.
“Tell me what you were staring at.”
“Uh, Joy look over your left shoulder at the girl in the orange top.” My husband is also snickering now. I look and this girl who looked to be sixteen or so has her purple sparkly thong exposed to us all. Gross.
Now when I was younger I admit that I thought I was hot shit when I wore butt-floss, but look how that turned out; I have a ten year old. Why is a “whale tail” sexy? Or is she trying to be slutty? If I was that girl’s mother I would hunt down every pair of that underwear like I was Buffy the damn Vampire Slayer and destroy them. Then she would be grounded. Until she went to college.
I see these girls everywhere I go. Shorts so short you can practically see the hair down there, providing they have it, shirts two sizes too small and a padded bra underneath, and dresses or skirts that also leave nothing to the imagination. I can’t imagine it’s comfortable to walk around with a crotch-wedgy all the time, and where are these girl’s parents? If dressing like you’re a “working girl” is what it takes to be popular now, let me formally apologize to Amelia and Claire because you will never ever, ever, ever, ever, dress like that so apparently you will not be one of the popular girls.
Now that my daughters won’t be candidates for the popular cliques when they get older, I guess I need to concentrate on my son. He’s at the age where he is just starting to check girls out. When we went to Kalahari in Sandusky at the beginning of March 2012 he actually said “there are so many bikini’s here!” before running off between a matching set of green bikini-clad girls toward the water slides. Ugh. Should I start buying condoms now and stocking up on the whole sex-talk material thing? I feel like I need to do something to prevent him from getting to that point, but with all the sex in movies and among the kids in schools now I doubt there’s anything I can do short of yanking him out of school and locking him away in his room. But honestly, I don’t have the patience to homeschool him.
So where am I now? I have two little girls destined to be unpopular and dressed like nuns and a son that is destined to father a child at the age of eleven. How did I get here? The pressures of fitting in drove me to the point of doing crazy things like spending a hundred dollars on Tommy Hilfiger jeans and Nikes (each, not together), and practically starving myself to the point of passing out at the skating rink after a skating marathon, requiring an ambulance to retrieve my unconscious body with a blood sugar so low it required two intravenous doses of glucose-which burns like a mother, and a several hour stay in the emergency room during which the doctor accused me of taking drugs. I hate to think about what my kids will go through to fit in at that age, when peer pressures and the noose of “status” dangles over their heads. Luckily for me I’m married now and don’t have to try as hard to make everyone like me. Unless you look like Barbie, or Zooey Deschanel because let’s face it – nobody is as cute as she is, even my husband has a crush.
As for my children, I just hope that they got the “good genes” and stay tall thin and beautiful, and that my son’s hair stays red because who can refuse a cute red haired little boy with freckles across his nose? Not Victoria, that’s for sure.
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