The hardest part about living without apology

My oldest daughter has had to learn a very difficult thing about her mother, and that is that I don't fit in with most people where we live.  I have friends, of course, but I'm never going to be the head of the P.T.A.  I had applied for a job with her school, and had been volunteering in the area where the job was available.  I didn't need it, but she was excited to have me possibly working there, so I did it for my kids.

I wasn't even interviewed for the position.

When my oldest found out, she was upset and angry and telling me how it wasn't fair and all the kids wanted me.  I just smiled and let it go until she calmed down, and then we had the talk about forcing yourself to fit in where you don't really belong. 

Now, I don't wear a shirt emblazoned with "Liberal Atheist Vegetarian" around town, but I also don't make any bones about my beliefs, and I don't apologize for it.  If that means I lose out on a few $7.25 an hour jobs (for only 20 hours a week, by the way), so be it; it doesn't hurt me any.  However, for my daughter, who is in the middle of that crazy time in life where not fitting in is the be all-end all of her world, it is hard for her to grasp this concept of not wanting to be just like everyone else.  (She has informed me she wants to move to Seattle, where no one would give someone like me a second glance.  She has a point.)

To be fair, my refusal to play along with the whole conservative religious thing has cost me; at one job, I had literature from my boss on my desk every morning telling me how God could make me a better person; and at another, I was let go for refusing to join his church, and for telling his partner, who was a minister, that words like fag, queer, a gook, were just a tad offensive (seriously...I swear).  But going to church isn't going to change who I am; it will just make me a liar, and I find it far more important to be honest, than to fake who I am just so people will like me.  It just isn't going to happen.  And if someone likes a fake me, but not the real me, then that person was never truly a friend to begin with.

And that's exactly what I told her.