uuuugh.

I was talking to the ladies at the office today, and I came to realize something. I have never gone to a church and easily made friends and enjoyed my stay there. I've never had a problem at work, I'm not antisocial and I don't really have a hard time making friends, so I'm not totally sure why this is the case. But at every single church I've gone to since elementary school, I've had trouble with my peers, especially the girls.

When I was in elementary school, the problem was that my family was poor so my clothes were outdated and while they were well-maintained, they weren't pretty and delicate and trendy like the other girl's clothes. I was also really awkward and didn't take singing lessons or dance lessons like the other girls did so they didn't relate to me. As I got older and we left that church because of the damage our stay did to our whole family (it happened to my sister and my parents, too), we found a church in the town we moved to subsequently and began attending there.

By this time I was in middle school and was old enough to go into the Youth services. At first it wasn't so bad... At first it was the whole "new kid" thing where they were all attracted to the novelty of someone that's not from the area. But after the honeymoon wore off, once again I had the girl problem. I got on great with the adults because I loved learning about the scriptures and had a knack for theology, and even in middle school I had a very strong sense of right and wrong. But with the kids my age, the girls came to blatantly dislike me to the point of telling me so, and I'm still not completely sure why. I never tried to be the center of attention, I never chased boys and wouldn't have dreamed of chasing someone else's boyfriend, and I wasn't like the other goody-goody's in the youth group that tried to shove their beliefs down everyone's throat. My attitude has always been to lay under the radar. Still, I have very strong memories of the preacher's kid telling me that my dress was ugly infront of the whole youth group (which if she said that to me today, I would have told her where she could kiss off and walk away), my cousin telling me to go away forever and leave her alone infront of the whole sunday school class (again, as an adult I weigh these things much differently... But at the tender age of 14 it hurt deeply), and a girl who would later try to become my friend and then stab me in the back turn the whole youth group against me because the boy she liked was interested in me. My mom always told me it was because I was a really good girl, and once they figured out that I wouldn't try to start doing the "wrong" things, they got bored with me... And later became threatened by me, and began to feel that I looked down at them from my ivory tower because of their own guilt complexes.

But the thing was, I never really made the conscious choice to be different or be good. I think they saw it that I thought I was above boys and makeup and clothes and friends because I was so pious that no one could keep up with me. But in reality, I was incredibly scared and awkward, and my mom had built this innate fear of girls into me that if I became good friends with them, they would pervert my mind and I would end up doing drugs in a van by the river. She never really put the thought in my mind that I could make my own decisions, she just kind of gave me this feeling that I would become evil by default just by hanging out with other girls. I don't think she did it intentionally. Her control issues are a well-understood problem now, but in retrospect I didn't know that mothers shouldn't be such micromanagers. I didn't really have much of a childhood because I spent much of it having very adult opinions crammed into my head, picketing news stations and gay rallies with my mom. To her, it was a vantage point and a pride issue to have her 8 year old lobby about the benefits of a child welfare bill being passed through senate. There were no cheerleading clinics and dance classes for me, there were books and videos about the American Government and my mom's best friend whom I called "aunt" that came to my house and affected me in a very positive way- she just oozed of feminism and equal rights. I had a difficult time going from being a little girl to a teenager, so I didn't wear makeup because I wanted to hold onto my youth a little longer. We couldn't afford fashionable clothes, so I just didn't wear them. I didn't know I was supposed to care. Plus, when other girls were reading nothing but Baby Sitter's Club and American Girls, I was reading books on Lottie Moon and Anne Frank and Eleanor Roosevelt... So I had nothing in common to talk to them about.

Then I finally got fed up enough and left that church and began attending the super-mega-church down the road and made the worst decision ever. I met my first boyfriend within the first month of attending there. Not only that, but he wasn't the atypical boy the girls on this end of town approve of as boyfriend material. Super-mega-churches usually need a wealthy end of town. That's how they become super. So, naturally, the kids in the youth group there are perfect and beautiful and the girls start out being groomed as young as five years old to recieve the following things before they graduate high school:
1) A superlative in the year book atleast once, if not all four years. Preferrably a superlative that has to do with their apperance/personality. IE: Best Personality, Most Attractive Couple (see next point), Most School Spirit.
2) Exclusively date atleast one football player, preferrably the captain. If not, a member of the starting offensive line. Snag "most attractive couple" superlative atleast once, if not go for prom/homecoming/whatever king and queen. Bonus points if the relationship with said football player becomes long term.
3) A snap bid to sister's, mother's, aunt's, and grandmother's sorority at Alabama, Auburn, or Tennesee upon graduation. Bonus points: if said sorority is Phi Mu, Alpha Gamma Delta, or Zeta Tau Alpha.

Now, while my first boyfriend was technically a football player, he was by all means not in the cookie cutter mold of what the other girls approved of. He wasn't very physically attractive, he was shy, not very funny, and didn't have that flirtatious knack with women of all ages (be they 5 or 95). All the way around, he wasn't exactly known for his social skills... As a matter of fact, he was better known for his lack thereof. He hated social situations, so we just didn't go to them. I ended up kind of being lumped with him in their minds because they didn't know me that well, and they had been around him enough to get an idea of how un-cookie cutter he was. By the time he and I had broken up two years later, I had a very difficult time keeping friends at the church. We broke up six months before I graduated into the college ministry, and I found that it was ten times more presumptuous and clique-ish than the youth group was. By then, people were marginalized into where they went to school, and they were all of the most prestigious schools in Birmingham. I was literally the only person in the entire room that attended the HUGE community college down the road, and that read as "poor" so nobody wanted to have anything to do with me. I came to learn that the college ministry there was all about networking, and people made friends with you depending on how prosperous they considered you to be. The girls kind of stuck together and would only accept other girls if they were equally as beautiful and empty-headed; and the guys were playing executive even though they're still in college by getting together for golfing trips and calling in favors from wealthy uncles, etc for their friends. Looking back, Super-Mega-Church reminds me of an Apple that has been eaten from the inside out by worms- on the outside it is shiny and delicious looking, but on the inside it's nothing but filth and rotting flesh.