A few weeks ago I was sitting in a waiting room and picked up a parenting magazine. I typically steer clear of parenting magazines as a rule because I don't need 100 pages a month to tell me all the things I should or should not be doing with my kids. I do subscribe to two magazines, though. One is Family Fun, which I'm pretty sure is a Disney sponsored one, and the other is Parenting. I love Family Fun. It has very little about parenting, and what parenting advice it does offer is merely an article or two written by a real mom (sometimes dad) finding something that happened to work for a problem that one family happened to be experiencing. Sometimes they apply to my life, sometimes not. They also have a travel section in each edition and some cute crafts (if you're into that thing...) and recipes. It's fun stuff, which duh, I guess is the point!
I have no idea how I came across a subscription to Parenting. It must have been a very cheap deal that I got quite a long time ago and got the magazine for three or four years straight. I don't like it. Case in point, I read an article with many, many quotes from one, maybe two "professionals" about how picky eaters are made, not born. LIE! LIE! LIE! They clearly didn't speak to anyone who actually has a picky eater or expand their research base and question researchers who have proven that certain people are "super-tasters". I threw the entire magazine that month in the recycling bin without bothering to read the rest. There is one columnist, a man, that I do enjoy reading in there though. He's pretty down to earth, which is very refreshing for a magazine that offers a fashion section with celebrity kid picks so you can see how to dress your child that season. You know how I choose my kids' fashion? a. What the school deems is uniform policy appropriate; b. What's a good deal at the consignment sale; and c. What his brother wore two years before him.
OK, so I really digressed. This post is not about magazines at all. Back to the magazine I was reading in the waiting room. There was an article about how to find other mom friends and how to fit in as a mom. Yes, this is a real thing. I went to a small high school, graduating in a class of about 150 kids. We had clicks. Every high school does, but ours were different. Our clicks were just groups of friends. We didn't really care all too much about the other clicks by the time high school rolled around. People had pretty much settled themselves into who they were and for the most part, people respected that and we left each other alone. I was not in the so-called "popular" click and never had any aspirations to be in it. They smoked, drank, did drugs. I was, in case you couldn't guess from my wild book challenges and crochet projects, a good girl. Occasionally the clicks crossed. I was in ski club who had this strange assortment of people from across all clicks of high school life. There was me. There was Flo, a born again Christian who handed us pamphlets while riding the lifts to the top of the mountain. There was Peggy, BIG hair, flirt with everyone, smoked like a fiend. There were the popular potheads and the more typical dreg potheads. The potheads would say, "We're going into the woods!", which meant we're going to light up and Peggy, Flo, and I would say, "OK, see ya at the bus!" That was the extent of my peer pressure experience in high school. There was none. I never once was pressured to do anything I didn't want to do. If fact, people were so respectful of me, I never even got a nice invitation to join in.
College was pretty much the same. I went to a Brethren school that didn't believe in Greek life, so there were no sororities or fraternities. People just went about their own business with their own group of friends. Then I became an adult and it all changed. Pretty sad that the people you spent your youth with turned out to be more mature than the people you spend adulthood with. My first year of teaching I was actually told I'd be more cool if I smoked, and one girl proclaimed she'd make a smoker of me by the end of the school year. She failed miserably. During those four years in Maryland, my husband and I were purposefully not invited to select parties, why I'm not sure. One summer, my husband took over the school's summer softball league. Most of the people who made the commitment to be apart of the team, didn't honor their commitment all too regularly. He was left scraping together a team some nights at the last minute. We had one good friend, who was also not apart of the "popular" teachers, who would pull some of his college buddies to help us out. The last game of the summer, everyone decided to show up and go out to a bar afterwards. We showed up to the bar and they all looked at us with surprised faces that we came. They hadn't saved us seats and it was a terribly awkward moment. We left. I was in tears. My husband, then fiance, was even visibly upset. We were getting married in a year and then made the decision to move to Jersey.
We've been in South Jersey for ten years now. We moved back to my husband's hometown where all of his friends still live. It's a very small town, just one square mile, and it neighbors another very tiny town that's slightly older with beautiful Victorian homes. Our property sits on the boarder of the two towns. Half of our block is, let's call it Our Town, and the other half is Their Town. I've been here ten years I have yet to make a single friend. None of my husband's friends reached out to me when I moved here. We were never invited over for dinner or to go anywhere or do anything with them. I thought it might have been because they had started having kids, but even when I had Sal, there was nothing. My husband's best friend had a son just months before Sal was born. I invited them over for dinner. They made no effort to reciprocate dinner, or anything for that matter. Our boys barely know each other, which is terribly sad given they are schoolmates. I thought moving to a deeply rooted, small town would be great, but people are so deeply rooted they don't have much room for someone new, I guess.
A couple of years ago, Eli went to a preschool that had several kids from Their Town. Their Town people don't have their own high school. They filter into our high school at the ninth grade. Their Town people will usually go to private school rather than stoop to going to our high school. I didn't think too much of this because I'm not all too crazy about my kids going there. Anyway, a couple of years ago while Eli was in preschool, I talked to a couple of Their Town moms every day after school. After preschool, I would run into one of the moms at the library and pool. She barely said two words to me. I was baffled. Then weeks later, she struck up this long conversation with me at the library. It was just she and I, and then it hit me. In all the other scenarios where she wouldn't speak to me, she was with other Their Town moms. I took to observing. The Their Town moms at the pool, soccer games, and library will actually form a huddle. When they are together, no one else gets into the huddle. I've actually been in conversations with some of them and when more moms show up, they will move away from me to form the huddle.
Here's the thing that bothers me. In high school, I never wanted to be apart of another click because I didn't have the same interests as the click. But, these moms are people I am like. They are stay-at-home moms, most with three kids, who live a life very similar to mine...except I have a different zip code. Is that really the reason?? I want to be their friend, apart of the group, but I'm the sad unpopular mom who doesn't fit in.
It's really hard for me to wrap my brain around the concept of being excluded because of my zip code. My husband has accused me of overreacting, but even he has recently observed some pretty snobbish behavior and isn't getting on me too much for it. I have developed a rather low self-esteem over the past few years as a result of the Our Town/Their Town shut out. You can't help but wonder if it's something wrong with you. I have stopped trying to be a part of the community. I focus on my family instead. But, every now and then, an article pops up in front of me like this one. It talked about how moms were judged because they didn't want to join a knitting or reading club, and I was like, "They have knitting clubs!!" There's nothing like that around here, and I have yet to hear of a book club. Maybe it's that I haven't been asked to join. Oh, by the way, I just want to put this out there. I don't want you people to think I'm just sitting around waiting for an invitation to something. I have tried to start my own social events that no one responds to. Last summer I heard about crockpot freezer meal swaps where you prepare one meal over several times and get together to swap them out so everyone goes home with several different dinners. I put the idea out there on Facebook to the locals, and while friends who lived in other parts of the country (high school and college friends, btw) shouted out that they wished they lived closer because they LOVED the idea, not a single taker in South Jersey. Not one! That's a fun thing, right?? It sounded like a smart, practical thing at least. I'm at a loss.
So that's the reason I want to move. Only, I don't really want to move. When we bought this home together, we had so many hopes and dreams for it. We love our house and we have really great neighbors, all retirees, who look out for each other. We brought all three boys home from the hospital to this house and don't want to move to a mass school district. And will it be any better if we do move? Is this how life just is now? Clearly other moms across the country are feeling shut out just like me, but there are moms that have clicked and are supportive of each other.
Over the past couple of months I have made some new friendly acquaintances, no one to call friend yet, but definite potential. I'm not holding my breath, but perhaps something might change? Maybe? I hope? Maybe it takes a little bit of time to make friends, like fifteen years instead of five or ten? I don't really know. I'm trying to stay optimistic and not turn too bitter about my circumstances.
Over the summer it's easier to forget about being left out. I don't have all too many interactions with the "mean girls" save at the pool, and even then once swim lessons are over, it's limited. But, now that September is here there is much more contact at school functions. Soccer season, too, is upon us which mixes Our Town and Their Town kids. This is a pretty charged atmosphere for me. The Their Town moms are in full swing socializing during soccer season. Last year, my parents and aunt were down to see the boys play. Eli's game ended and we walked across the playing fields to Sal's game and put our chairs down in the shade about a foot or two from another woman that was there. She was actually talking to the daughter-in-law of our next door neighbors. I didn't think we were all that close, and we didn't sit in front of her, but slightly behind her. It was a hot, sunny day and we simply were trying to get in the shade. She became extremely offended that we sat next to her, stood up, and said, "Well, I guess I'll move!" I said we were just trying to get some shade and hadn't intended for her to move. (Seriously? Did she own the shade?) She refused to answer and moved her chair about five feet from us. About twenty minutes later, she stood up and moved again shooting insults at my family for their rudeness. We sat next to her. We didn't block her view or touch any of her belongings. I am very aware of personal space, and we didn't cross any social boundaries. She just didn't want us near her. I was shocked and left in tears. I have never been treated with such inhumanity.
So, my prayers this weekend are for me. I'm praying to hold on and not feel all too shunned by these other women. I obviously don't know them too well, so maybe there is something they are struggling with that I can't understand. I'm hoping for a positive soccer season where no one is so repulsed by my mere presence she feels the need to physically move away from me. I've allowed these external forces to occupy my mind and emotions. I'm really praying that I can keep faithful to these challenges I've created for myself to act as a distraction from all of these negative, external forces that are working on me right now. They don't deserve power over me, and I've allowed them to have too much power over how I think about my home, my appearance, my parenting skills, my overall self-worth as a person. I never compromised myself as a teenager, so I certainly don't want to do it now at thirty-seven. Here's to a new season!
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