Thursday, January 13, 2011

Weird


We have a lot of conversations about being weird at our house.
We celebrate it.

I think it started when one of the kids had a bad day and came home from school saying,

"Mom, I'm weird."

Instead of disagreeing I said,

"That's okay honey, it's a good thing.
Also, normal is boring."

We say "normal is boring" a lot.

I have four children between 12-18, and these years are not easy peer-wise.

There is always someone cooler, someone better-looking, someone who has nicer clothes.

But we have a corner on the weirdness factor, and claiming that,
instead of denying it,
sort of helps ease the teenage angst.

Why fight it?

When you are a teen you feel weird all the time.
So let's be honest about it and just ride the wave of weirdness.

I was driving the husband somewhere the other day and stopped at the high school to drop Middle Child off at dance team practice.

There was nobody around so instead of parking at the edge of the ramped sidewalk,
I just pulled up to the door.

The husband sighed.

The child, who had been silently absorbed in her own morose back-seat thoughts,
grinned like mad and stepped out,
and waved,
and kept waving as I backed out again.

She likes it that we aren't normal.

We color outside the lines, and sometimes, we drive outside of them.

I had a friend once, who, when I tripped on the sidewalk,
did the exact same thing a second later so that I wouldn't be so embarrassed.

I feel my weirdness contribution to the world is sort of like that.

*

3 comments:

Brian Miller said...

i like being weird too...normal is boring...butmost dont realise it cause they are too normal...

CiCi said...

I would trip for you too if I were walking by you. You rock. Your family rocks too.

Diane said...

Was that me? If it wasn't, it should have been.