Comment: "Oh my God I can't believe it, I've never been this far away from home."

It was amazing to me to feel as I imagine my son felt today at a small and generally friendly birthday party where we both felt like fish out of water. I say amazing, because I usually don’t feel like that in social situations. Years of hiding my problems successfully from even the closest members of my family along with a two degrees in Theatre mean I can usually get by successfully in a crowd.

But we live in a new area, and it’s not familiar. I don’t know my audience. And I was humbled today as I stood around listening to perfectly nice moms talk about skiing vacations and owning multiple houses and being in the community for their whole lives. I was totally out of my depth.

We live in on the edge of ghetto where shopping carts and broken down file boxes dot the lawns. Even though my husband has a great job, it costs a boatload to live where we’ve chosen to live. And I’m not sure it’s right for any of us. Today really hit that home.

Let me just say that it’s nothing against these well-off, homegrown folks; it’s me. I just didn’t feel comfortable there, and neither did my son. It wasn’t pretensions, it was tension of a different kind. We were not in our world, whatever that is, and wherever that is.

My son is an introvert who prefers grown-ups to kids. I am an extrovert who prefers kids to grown ups. I find most grown ups exhausting with their high status bullshit and neurotic over-parenting. (I probably shouldn’t be casting any stones in the latter neighborhood, but I’m all over the former.)

Anyway, my son stuck close to me the whole time, which was fine in a way, because I didn’t have a whole lot to say to these well-meaning people. Several of them were also members of the swim club where the party was.

A swim club? I need to join a club to go swimming?

WTF?

Sorry, I’m a little unfamiliar. I mean, I lived in Southern California for ten years and I’ve never heard of a freaking swim club. And I’m damn well leery of anything with the word club attached to it. I’m just not a club-joining gal. I like people, but I don’t like being involved in something where other people are excluded.

And that was what was getting to me today; I was eavesdropping on a world I don’t feel I or my son belonged in, but there we were. With a straight face, these nice moms were telling me we should check out Tahoe and get the kids skiing lessons and I was just knocked out that they were telling me this with a straight face—did they think we belonged? My shy son and I, who are more comfortable playing in the crappy park near our house with people we’ve just met?

And as I watched some of these pampered kids at the party getting their fourth juice box and stuffing their fingers in the onion dip, I just thought, what are we doing here? These kids are already so much more socially sophisticated than my son. Even though he read at three, he is still so young in the social game; he is incapable of being cruel, and I see that there are already kids out there ready to pounce on him or anyone else sitting where they want to be sitting. And their parents have given them so much positive self-esteem that they think they can push other people around. They feel they have carte blanche. They have their own customized skis. Of course they can sit here. And win all the prizes. And ask for seconds and thirds.

OMG indeed.