I was searching my brain for a character I hadn’t thought of in awhile, someone random I could re-introduce. It wasn’t someone I knew and I was just searching for their name. I was purposely hoping to find some character I had forgotten about that I could find some inspiration from and insert into a scene.
I still haven’t found that elusive character from my story universe, but it did make me think of someone I occasionally remember.
My family was weird, the kids at school told me so. My brothers were bullied mercilessly. We were always outsiders. That isn’t really the point of this, but serves as an introduction to my life as a homeschooler from second grade onward. Because I didn’t have friends, and I hated going to school and being reminded that I didn’t have friends.
Every couple of years I would get so hyped up about the ideas of friends that I would ask Mom about going back to school. I felt that if I was at school, friends would just happen. And Mom warned me that it wasn’t that easy to make friends. (Incidentally, I originally wrote “get” friends and auto-correct reminded me that the term was “make” friends. I’m clueless.) It wasn’t in an unkind way. Just that she knew what it was like, because it had been the story of her life, too.
I’m not against homeschooling. I just don’t think it sets you up for socializing as much as pro-homeschoolers imply. What homeschooling does is give you experience for socializing with people with your exact beliefs. It’s still going to be a culture shock when you get a job or go to school outside your bubble. For a weird person like me, that was going to happen whether I was in public school or homeschool. If you’re not innately weird, it’s probably jarring.
My mom took me to one of those homeschool co-op meetings once that the blogs talk about. I don’t remember how she found out about it (we weren’t in any social circles). But we went, and the kids went off to play while the moms did whatever. I remember the kids being a little younger than me and not that interesting, and they didn’t find me interesting, and it wasn’t really fun at all. Except there was one girl who was closer to my age and eventually we started talking and went off to the playground and I actually felt like this was someone I could be friends with. She talked about Hot Wheels and I probably talked about my My Little Pony collection. I actually don’t remember what I talked about, except I said something along the lines of “we’re all our own kind of weird” when she mentioned feeling like she didn’t fit in because of her Hot Wheels collection. She was just someone I was able to talk to, and that was kind of nice.
Then the meeting ended and we went our separate ways and that was the end of it. I certainly didn’t know how to keep in communication with her, especially in the days before the internet. I don’t know anything about her, but I still think about her every so often, thirty years later. I wonder if we could have been friends.
My mom’s experience with this group was that when she brought up My Little Pony (we were always looking for ways to buy MLP collections, Mom was an enabler), the other moms told her that any MLP in the house had to have their unicorn horns cut off. Because reasons. That told Mom that these were not our people. We never went back.
Anyway, there’s no point to this article. Just ruminating on a missed opportunity.