Normal (2)
In writing yesterday’s post, I realized something funny. Somewhere along the way, after giving up on being "normal," it happened anyway…
At least from the outside, I look pretty darn normal: I’m in a monogamous heterosexual marriage, in a house in the suburbs with a mortgage, two kids and a minivan…. Needing glasses made me stick out in third grade, but are pretty common now. I still read too much and don’t wear enough makeup, but in grown up life, that doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
I actually derive great pleasure from the fact that I appear normal on the outside, while still being delightfully (to my mind, at least) off-kilter and twisted on the inside. It’s like my own private joke on society.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
So funny Elizabeth. I had this same insight while reading my own blog (two kids, 2.75 years apart, a boy and a girl, piano lessons, soccer, married to a lawyer, minivan). Now I’m brown, so that will always make me not “normal” here in the US, and, I refuse to wear shoes with laces, and never wear any makeup. But, my blog sure looks like a standard mom blog.
bj
October 11th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
I think it’s a lot harder to be “different” as an adult. By the time we get to parenthood, we’ve learned either to hide our differences or we’ve lost them altogether. In our school of 200+ families, I can think of dozens of kids who aren’t normal, but very few adults who don’t fit in. We have a wide range of ethnicities and incomes, but almost everyone seems normal. Or perhaps as adults, we have increased our boundaries for normal behavior?
October 12th, 2007 at 9:45 am
As an adult, you also have much more control over your environment — you can move to a place where you are closer to the norm. As a child I was living in small towns in Nebraska and being teased for reading books. As an adult I live in the city of Chicago where you’re considered a freak for voting Republican.
Just thinking about how freakish I feel when I visit my parents or in-laws for holidays, etc., gives me much insight into my childhood!
October 12th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
But isn’t it also that part of the perception of being “different” as a child adolescent angst? When I started reading the beginning of Twilight? (the Forks vampire series), I remember thinking, is there ever a book about adolescence that doesn’t start with a description of how out of place the individual is? I’m not sure whether kids who don’t feel that way never write books (the Janis Ian “at seventeen” concept) or whether every kid actually feels that way, even if they don’t look like they do.
I do think there’s a broadening definition of “normal” in the world at large, that adults learn to become normal, or at least appear so, that as adults we have more control over our own environments, so we can approach normal locally, even if we’re odd. But, I also think a large part of one’s own feelings are a contrast of adolescence with adulthood (probably subserved by changing brain circuitry).
October 12th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
elizabeth, i’ve had the exact same conversation with my husband. he used to tease me about being so supposedly “counter-cultural” (my youthful self-identity) when the reality was – mortgage. professional career. city politics. i.e., the very personification of the establishment in many ways. it’s ironic isn’t it, the way normalcy sneaks up on us?
October 15th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Yeah, despite my occasionally pink hair, I’ve realized that I now blend in with the blur of adults, as well.
Despite being sure, back in those in between years from jr high thru college, that I would always be the odd woman out.
How did this happen?
And yes, minivan, monogamous, only 1 kids tho…
October 15th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
I think it’s all of these things. In many ways adult life requires less conformity than high school. But it also allows us to choose who we spend our time with far more than HS does, so most of us self-select into subgroups where at least some of our oddities seem perfectly normal. And most of us have learned that we don’t have to share every aspect of our lives and every thought that passes through our minds with everyone we meet.
I think that’s part of why the whole parenting social scene can be so frightening — we’re all more or less stuck with the people who live nearby and have kids the same age as ours, and they might not be people we’d choose to spend time with otherwise.