Not The Girl Next Door

I am not the girl next door, nor will I ever be. I'm not a size zero, nor will I ever be. I'm not a perfect ten, nor will I ever be. I'm not a runway model, nor will I ever be. I'm no longer wishing to be what I'm not, nor will I ever again. When I was a young girl I was never considered to be pretty. I was always picked on, and none of the boys noticed me. I was a nice girl, always trying to be friendly with everyone, especially the new students that would join our class, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't keep new friends. I wasn't a popular kid, and once the new kids I'd befriended found that out, they went to the other side of the lunchroom. Throughout the majority of my adolescent years I had only one, or two friends in school, and it wasn't until I went into high school when I began to really blossom. The summer before my freshman year I had lost a lot of weight, and discovered I had lots of curves for a fifteen-year-old. I had let my hair grow out, and I had an incredible summer tan. So my first days as a high school freshman was a huge change from what I had been used to. Although I ended up liked by more boys, they weren't the ones I'd hoped would like me. Once again I tried to fit it, but my unique style of goth rocker chic meets Madonna wasn't the most popular thing going in the early nineties. I was tossed into the mixed crowd, because I wasn't preppy like the cheerleaders, or brainy like the nerdy geek clan, I wasn't really the leftover eighties glam-rocker-

gang style either, and the goths were just catching on there. I wasn't the back woods redneck look at me wrong and I'll kick your ass group of badass girls either, but I made damn sure to make friends with them. I guess I was just a floater, because I went from group to group making friends with at least one person from every click in school. But, I was still not considered pretty, or popular. This became a problem for me, because I cared more about fitting in than I did my education, and I didn't realize then that my fucking off freshman year by skipping school, cutting classes, and cheating on my homework, or flirting with the teachers just to get a passing grade would have been the path to failure. Luckily I passed my freshman year, but barely. The next few years of school I buckled down. My sophomore year I not only decided I was going to buckle down and work hard in school, get good grades and strive to achieve excellence. I even gave myself a radical makeover before school started by cutting off my hair like Demi Moore's in Ghost. I also tried to adapt the present clothing style that was popular with the other girls. I wanted to be in with the good girl, preppy and smart group. Ok, I took that too far thinking I could fit in, but I have always liked a challenge. Needless to say it didn't really work the way I'd planned, and popularity as it comes down to it is overrated. The next years leading up to graduation was filled with life changes no teenager should ever endure. I ended up among one of the first major generations to become pregnant in high school. Of course it wasn't planned and that story is going to be for another time altogether. What did happen in the end is that I kept my son, finished school, and although it wasn't at all with honors, but I still graduated with a one-year-old son included. High school wasn't the best times in my life, I'm so glad that nightmare will never happen again. It stays in the past as a distant memory, and I've moved past all of the hurt and embarrassment I lived through. But, it did set me on the path I've followed into the present, and twenty years or so later I'm still in one piece with four more children, and even a grandson from my eldest who sat and watched me graduate high school. My journey I've traveled throughout my life has given and taken away, but I still hold on to my childhood dreams of being that popular girl in school I never got to be.