Holding Water in Your Hand

First Through Sixth

My entire childhood I can remember wishing I was adopted or that I was a twin.  I never was a very popular little kid and I've never really fit in with my family.  I was the strange child.  In school, I was always taller than all the other little kids up until the sixth grade.  But even then I was taller than most.  Then it was the fact that my chest was under developed.  But I was terrorized all through my junior high career by a boy named James Ayers.  Every chance he could get he would call me sasquach.  I never did really have equal propotions.  I had big hands and big feet and a little nose.  My dad calls it a Hatcher nose and that I shouls be lucky I wasn't cursed with the ski slope that my aunt has.

Then as a kid I didn't really have too many friends, either.  When I was little, I had my uncle.  That is until he passed away due to a very untimely death.  Then, when I would stay at my mamaw's house, I had Jessica.  When we were little and we first met, she reminded me very much of what the olsen twins looked like in their mystery solving days.  She doesn't look anything at all like that now.  But in preschool, I had no friends.  I barely sat down to learn anything, because what they were going over I had already learned with my mom and dad.  When the teacher would ask the class where they lived, the magority would answer, "Down the road," or "Accross the bridge."  Whereas, I would give the teacher my exact adress and phone number.  I can't remember them now, though.  But When my family moved to Sophia, West Virginia, I had Savanna, but that was outside of school.  In school, I had one friend, and her name was Nichole.  No one else gave me the time of day.  Nichole was my friend from kinder garten until the second grade when she moved and I never saw her again.  and then, in the third grade, for the most part, I was a loner.

In third grade, I was seated between Marty Smith and Robbie something.  I can't remember his last name for the life of me.  But I do remember that I didn't have any friends that were girls.  I also remember that I had a crush on one Brad Godbe and Harold Messenger.  And so, Harold and I became boyfriend-and-girlfriend.  Although most of that year was spent talking to Marty and Robbie.  Mostly, I remember swinging durring recess and Robbie would come and ask me to do something he was too weak to do, or Marty and I would dangle from the under side of the slicky-slide. I didn't have another female friend until late in the year when I made friends with a Kelsey Accord, who was in the other class of third graders.

In fourth grade, I made my first female friend.  Her name was Lisa Vaughn and she was just as quiet as me.  We hit it off almost instantly and I had a best friend all the way up until the sixth grade.  And she was there for me to sit with me at lunch and tell me Harold was stupid when he dumped me.  Later that year I made friends with an Olivia Miller, who I was instantly jealous of.  She had a tiny waist and a flat belly and I didn't.  It made me feel inferior and I wanted a flat tummy too, but no matter how hard I worked I could never get my stomach to look like hers.  And then she would walk around with her arm covering her stomach like she was ashamed.  I didn't understand.  So, I would walk around that way, too.

I was still pretty socially awkward.  I didn't really invest any of my time into any real friend ships inside school because I knew that one day I probably wouldn't be very close to the people I'd gotten to know there, anyway.  And yet, somehow I managed to grow up and change my mind.