She’d ripped away the illusion that I was an innocent victim of fate, that some people were popular and others weren’t
When my mother was expecting me, she’d been prescribed a drug not indicated for pregnancy. It caused all my baby teeth to grow in a grayish brown. From a very young age, before children are usually subject to social pressure, I was teased and excluded.
Throughout elementary school, even as my baby teeth fell out and were replaced by normal white teeth, I couldn’t really fit in. I assumed that even though I now looked like every other girl when I opened my mouth, the kids had already labeled me an outcast and there was nothing I could do to escape it.
My mother, herself socially awkward, had grown up without friends and tried to teach me I had value in Hashem’s EEyes and shouldn’t care what anyone else thought. As hard as I tried not to be bothered — and to put on a show that I couldn’t care less what anyone thought of me — I desperately wanted to be accepted.
By eighth grade, I had a few girls who occasionally included me, and I could join a conversation without being rebuffed, but for the most part I usually found myself outside the social circle. That made me and Michal, one of the wealthiest and most popular girls in our class, a most unlikely pair. But every other girl in our class had a ride home immediately after school, while we were the only two girls who waited around for our parents to finish work.
Create a free account to keep reading.
