The Yellow Door Life

If I could give parents any advice it would be this, don’t purposefully make your child an only child, and don’t move your children mid-school year (if possible).

For now, I’ll focus on the latter. 

In March of 1998, I left the only home I ever knew. The place where I took my first steps. The place where I spoke my first words. The place where I learned that I loved bananas and yogurt. The place with the awesome jungle gym my grandad put together. 

I still dream about that house. That town. Those people.

My hometown was a place of safety for me. 

When we moved, everything changed. 

My new house didn’t have a fenced yard. It didn’t have room for my trampoline. The dogs were cooped up inside. The whole house was white and grey. There were no flowers on the flooring in the kitchen.

I grew to love that house, but when we first arrived, I wasn’t sure about anything.

I missed everything I had come to love and wondered what was going to happen next. 

Before moving, I never thought about having to make friends. The friends I had in my hometown seemed to always have been part of my life, even though I know I actually met them at some point in time that I can’t remember. 

Here, in this new place, it felt like I was auditioning for the role of friend. 

The kids in my neighborhood had some established friend groups, but were overall welcoming. We had a lot of military families, so everyone was kind of used to getting moved around. 

School was another story. 

My parents were very excited for me to be able to continue attending private, Catholic school. It’s all I had really known, so I figured it would be similar to my old school, 

but it wasn’t. 

The private, Catholic schools here were full of a lot of kids that had wealthy families.

We weren’t the poorest of the poor, but we certainly did not fall under “wealthy.”

The rich kids in my class were not welcoming at all and often looked at me funny, while whispering stuff to each other. 

I finally made a friend with a girl who had moved there from Texas at the start of the year. She was incredibly kind to me and we got along instantly. 

One day at lunch, we were playing, and someone snuck over and took her lunch box. They filled her sandwich with sand. We came back and she was really upset because she couldn’t eat her lunch. 

She had an accent and the kids made fun of her. I couldn’t figure out why. She never did anything to them and she was so sweet to me. 

Eventually, she moved, and I was alone again. 

At that point, I made friends with my best friend (who I still have today), but even that wasn’t perfect. Another one of her friends didn’t seem to like me. She was the first person to ever call me fat. 

This cycle continued throughout all of elementary and middle school. 

I would make friends with the new girls, because I knew exactly how they felt, but they would either move away, or ditch me once they became popular. 

I was continuously bullied for my looks, my weight, and simply who I was. 

I had never questioned my worth until second grade, but it began a time in my life where I always felt out of place. 

Years later, and I can still feel all those words.

All that business about sticks and stones and words, all turned out to be nonsense.

Words hurt.

They can either signal safety, or fear.

They can build bridges, or burn them. 

I may have felt very out of place back then, but the lesson I learned was to use my words carefully, because you never know who is still going to feel those words decades later.

❤