I’ve Never Fit In

I've always done things "my way" from the time I was a baby and refused to crawl; instead I got up and walked. My father called me individualistic and unique. My mother called me stubborn.

I was too old to be a baby-boomer, too young to be part of the World War II patriotic generation. I was too young for the "Happy Days" 50s, but too old and settled for the swinging 60s. I disliked Elvis Presley, and was unawed by the Beatles. I liked to say I was eccentric, but my brothers and sisters called me odd!

I was married when it was swinging to be single and still on my first and only marriage when my friends were collecting divorces and multiple marriages. Somehow I never fit in with society.

I was a feminist before it was fashionable; a mother of pre-schoolers when children were passé' and zero population was big. I went to college when homemaking was the style and dropped out to be a homemaker when careers became the craze! My husband served in Vietnam when protesting the war was hip; we were conservative before Reagan made it popular. I don't think I voted for any presidential candidate that won.

I did aerobics (while my children shut the drapes and locked the doors so the neighbors wouldn't find out) until it caught on and then I rode my bike. We lived in the city while everyone else moved to the suburbs, then reversed the trend when "gentrifying city neighborhoods" became the "IN" thing to do. We never went near the Silicon Valley.

Our contemporaries were celebrating empty nests and grandchildren when I came up with the most outrageous idea since the invention of birth control. We decided to have another child (in our already hopelessly "large" family of six) in our forties. So what happens; the "new traditionalism," large families and having babies "late in life" comes into style and I'm declared a trend-setter.


I'll never live it down.