Finding a place to belong

Since I wasn't feeling too great I just laid on the couch and watched TV most of the afternoon. I got the feeling there was a reason for me to just that.
I watched Oprah and it was this Challenge Day show where they were at a high school and the students opened up about their lives in front of other students. I cried the entire show. It was powerful, and certainly eye opening.
So many young people going through such hard things and here we are as adults often thinking, "kids haven't a clue about real life". As I watched these young people speak about being teased, feeling alone, having issues they kept well hidden, it reminded me of my own school years.
I was a non seventh day Adventist kid in an Adventist school, all 12 years. Painful is a word that doesn't even come close to describing what I went through.
From grade one I heard things like, "you are going to hell and so aren't your parents, they smoke and you don't go to our church. " Now I didn't hear that just once in a while, I heard it lots. Every morning there would be a time of singing and I never knew the songs because they were learned in Sabbath school at church. No one offered once to help me learn them. I was just left out and snickered at. The teachers were not much better than the students. Since my parents smoked when I was young, my clothes smelled like smoke and even the teachers would turn up their nose at me. I was always made to feel "less than." I was not asked to birthday parties or to go to anyone's house, except for two homes, one had a non seventh day Adventist father and the other home was pretty dysfunctional.
I never was included in anything that took place after school. High school was better but those first 8 years made me into a person that felt the need to brag about how much candy I had or how my parents spoiled me. I grew into a person that had to over achieve, do everything bigger and better, just so I would be noticed. Then on the family side of it, because I went to private school, I was different than even my own cousins. You see, we live with those same childhood labels into our adult life. The issues may have changed names but we still fight that same childhood battle.
I am now 52 and have finally given up trying to do everything bigger and better.
But, my search for a place to belong is still going on.
I wasn't SDA as a child, so didn't fit in there. As a young adult I joined the church, was asked every week for 3 years, to sign the guest book when I went to church. In time I became an elder in the church but it all felt like climbing a mountain, getting to the top and then deciding it wasn't all that great a view.
Later we wanted to find a good Christian community to raise our children in. We began attending the Mennonite church, went for several years but never could be members because Emery was married before. So again, rejected because we didn't quite measure up to some requirement. I am not whining here, please don't think that, I am going to make a point that relates to all of us.
I convinced my family to go to Orthodox Jewish services with me, only to be reminded that well, my marriage is not accepted of course since Emery is not a Jew.
So many of us wander through the internet world trying to find a group, a safe place to belong. Maybe we want to be French, maybe we want to be a homesteader, perhaps its the Celtic world or the headcovering group, maybe we want to be a with people that do this or that certain thing. Those are some of the places I have tried to fit into. And parts of me fit in and parts of me just have to play the part.You see we are all scattered from our families, we have no "clan" to belong to. Or at least many of us don't. I wrote about "women grinding wheat together" last year. How so many women are lonely for the friendship of other like minded women or even just to make cookies for Christmas with a sister, aunt and cousins. We all want some sense of community, just like these high school students today on the Oprah show.
You see, we are all the same, just the number of years we have lived is what has changed.
We all want acceptance, non judgment, and friends we can count on for liking us for who we are, without having to say and do things that are just to make people like us.
Of course my family is extremely loving and accepting but women seem to need extended family in their lives or close girl friends. We are social. We need to be "women grinding wheat together" as in the old days. Women of the village working together, talking, sharing wisdom, listening and nodding with understanding.
I don't have the solution... church groups may help but we need deep, full of acceptance relationships, more easily found in extended family where unconditional love is just part of the picture.
My early school days have sent me on a life long quest to find a place to fit in, to belong to. So far I have made a real habit of finding places that were not very accepting : )
After today I plan on looking at the world with a much more accepting heart.

here is the web site with the information about what was on the Oprah show today http://www.challengeday.org/

If this blog accomplishes just one thing, I want it to be that it gets people thinking about their life and about the deep things in life, heart things, something more than cooking, cleaning and baking. Those are good things, yes, but they are not the things that change the world or give you a legacy that will make future generations aware of who you really are inside.

Tuk Tuk and Ling Ling not being very accepting of Mrs Henny Penny