End of summer

It is almost the end of summer. Soon Z and I will start our new school routine and our homeschooling group will be meeting once a week again.

I am hoping things work out with this ISP. Even if they don't at least I will have given it a try.

I am looking forward to starting the new school year. When I was a kid I always loved the newness. I loved getting new back-to-school clothes and nice clean shoes. I loved picking out new pencils and notebooks and folders - all clean and full of promise.

I always imagined that this year would be different. That this year I would be different. I thought I could be someone else, a "normal" popular girl, a girl who didn't attract too much of the wrong kind of attention.

A rarely hoped that the other kids in school would be different. I didn't try to imagine some wonderland where kids appreciated my differences or even had the decency to be kind. I knew that wasn't going to happen. I knew that I had to be the one to make a change.

Sometimes I think I did fit in for a day or two. But inevitably I would raise my hand too often in class. I would give away that I already knew what the teacher was trying to teach by trying to have a conversation about the material covered in class. My need to talk to someone about the topics that interested me always led me away from my plan to be "normal".

God, school was so hard for me. There we a few shiny examples - some older students, a teacher here and there that took an interest in me - but mostly it was painful. I couldn't understand how people could be so cruel, I still don't. I developed reputations that really had nothing to do with me. I was, at various times, a bitch, a champion to the underdogs, notorious, dating the most popular boy in school, a brain, a weirdo, a teacher's pet, a badass, and strangely enough a few times I was the best friend to the most popular girl in my class.

Was it all bad? No. School was the place I daydreamed, read, fell in love, got into fights, stood up for my values, won awards, got suspended, made friends, and made enemies.

I went to 13 different schools in 12 years.

I hated school but I got there early most days because I wanted to be part of whatever was going to happen that day. I was used to life not making sense and hurting me but I wanted to be in it all the same.