My Complex

True story–I have a big fat inferiority complex.  Big.  Fat.  Huge.

I always have.  With some pretty good reason.  The list of what I am NOT good at, is much, much longer than the things I can do well.

And it goes way back.

I was 7 before I could ride my bike without training wheels.  The very last of my friends to do so.  When I tried walking on stilts, they just came down on  my head as I fell.  I think my dad spent more time explaining how to push them away from me so I wouldn’t get clobbered, when I fell.  I discovered I was afraid of heights when my cousin and I took our first gymnastics class.  I felt sick through ever lesson.  She was skilled enough to go on and compete if our area had such a team for her to join.  Monkey bars?  Are you kidding me?  I never got past the first bar before I dropped to the ground.  A yo-yo went down but never came back up for me.  Never.  Draw?  No way.  I disproved my art teacher’s theory that everyone can draw, they just have to focus so the right side of the brain could take over.  That pretty book holder I made in shop class?  My instructor did it.  I think I put the stain on.  Maybe.

When other kids understood fashion or being laid back and just laughing?  I was frumpy and serious.  While the other girls rocked mini-skirts, a girl laughed at me for having the ugliest, fattest knee she had ever seen.  At the school dances, I sent my time in the bathroom, calming down the girls who were crying so they could go back out and have fun–while I stayed in the  bathroom miserable.

While other kids were playing sports, I was being put on the B team and benched. When they went to games on Saturday, I went to a recombiant DNA workshop that I had qualified for, but honestly had no idea what I was doing.  Or I was spending part of my summer at a leadership conference where I found out I was the class idiot.  Every darn kid there was uber intelligent.  Like, make up your own language to use with your friends because you were bored, intelligent.  I literally walked in to the program to learn that I was the ONLY one not in a gifted program.

Let’s not even talk about how having Multiple Sclerosis in high school made me a weirdo.  As if I needed help.

College was better.  Not perfect, but better.

Marriage has been a challenge.  My hubby is a better cook than I.  He has skills that allow him to make things, real, tangible things.  He is nicer than I am.  He is calmer than I.  But the one that really shows me up?  Caitlyn.  She yo-yos, rainbow looms, climbs monkey bars and trees like a boss.  I look at her often and see again what a failure I am.  That little girl can do anything, absolutely, anything she puts her mind to.

And her ever classy mother is jealous of her own kid.

I always wanted to be good at one thing.  Just one thing.  I never was.  I never am.

It is very safe to say I harbor a lot of resentment.  Not against Caitlyn, but against myself and much of my life.

Sigh.