I’ve never really been on the outside looking in. I’m white. I grew up middle class (not upper, not lower, just smack in the middle). I went to college. I got married. I graduated. Got a job. Bought a house in the burbs. Had a baby. I lived in a bubble where all of my friends were basically doing all of the same things. We were all a bunch of middle class white people with two parent homes, driving two cars, working in our yards on the weekend.
But now, I’m on my own and live in an apartment (which I adore). Now I have to check the “divorced” box on questionnaires. Very soon I’ll have to check the “over 35″ box as well, but let’s not open up that wound yet. I have my old maiden name. I’m a single mother who works full time. And I feel like for the first time in my life, I’m on the outside looking in.
And people say dumb things. I’ll preface this by saying, I say dumb things. We all say dumb things. But it’s hard not to feel a little roasty when a woman pats your shoulder after you’ve arrived at work ten minutes late, with frizzy unfixed hair and three hours of sleep and says, “Being a working mom is so hard, I know. Sometimes you just have to plan your mornings better.”
And then you’re faced with a conundrum. You could overreact, blow your stack and yell, “YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW.” But you don’t. Instead you do a double take, catch yourself, smile, try to smooth down your crazy frizzy unfixed hair and think silently, “You’ve got the most awesome husband in the world who actually pays bills and cleans the kitchen and you didn’t go back to work full time until your kid went to kindergarten.”
Obviously when I say “you” I mean “me.” And part of that roasty feeling that starts at my toes and works it’s way up to my face has a lot to do with the fact that I am, sometimes, subsisting on three hours of sleep, and that just makes me crazy. Like, boil the bunny rabbit crazy. But it’s also a tiny bit because that woman who’s patting me on the shoulder like we’re serving in identical mustard gas trenches? She really doesn’t really get it.
And it makes me realize how much in life I didn’t get stuff either. When you’ve never been on the outside looking in on “normal” it’s almost impossible to get it. Like the time I told a friend, “You just can’t put a price tag on a good set of luggage.” And looking back, that friend was looking at me, feeling roasty, and thinking, “I just want to be able to afford to replace the transmission in my car so I can stop taking the bus every day. You can take your luggage and stick it where the sun don’t shine.”
I’ve also come to realize that most of the blogs I read are very similar to that life I used to lead. And it makes me think, “Eh.” There’s beautiful pictures and smiling kids and craft projects and fabulous vacations. This morning I read a post where a toddler snack consisted of apple raisin peanut butter sandwiches, edamame and freeze dried strawberries. You know what a snack consists of in this house? Bread with peanut butter. And if we’re really lucky and really fancy, I mix chocolate syrup into Jane’s milk and she screams (and I do mean screams because this stuff is crack to her), “BROWN MILK IS MY FAVORITE.”
Apple raisin peanut butter sandwiches, my foot. Brown milk is king around here.
But, I digress.
I realize being a divorced, white, single, working mother doesn’t exactly qualify me for minority status. There are lots of us (although I don’t know many and it feels isolating at times). But it has made me realize that I spent a lot of years being slightly oblivious to the fact that there is a world outside my previous normal. That no, sometimes you don’t care about good luggage. That no, not everyone owns a home. And sometimes it doesn’t matter how early you get up, or how much planning you do, sometimes your daughter is going to break the zipper on her Minnie Mouse purse and have a nervous breakdown on a Bell Jar sort of scale and you are, without a doubt, gonna be late for work in the morning because you are handling the entire solitary ordeal all by yourself.
But this whole outside looking in thing has been, in so many ways, a blessing. It’s kind of freeing, when I look back on that “normal” middle class majority life I lived, because it made me utterly miserable. I’ll take the working, crazy schedule stress over a fake smile. I prefer the brown milk over the almond encrusted edamame toddler tea time, or whatever the heck those bloggers are talking about. And this hard new life that I never ever would have “gotten” before? It’s a little bit amazing. I’m starting over. I’m building a life that makes me proud. And I’m able to, for the first time, look at other people in this world and realize that sometimes I just didn’t get it. And sometimes I still don’t get it. But I want to. I really do.
