Sigh - Again

I KNOW why people who want to parent go to expense and medical risk rather than adopting or fostering. 1) We have a strong genetic drive to propagate our own genes. 2) Its hard to qualify to foster, you have to pass background checks, home studies, prove that you know how to deal with children and have personal attributes and values that make for a postive childhood.

All you need to do to have a baby is get pregnant. If you don't have a partner, all you need is cash in hand, and some health insurance plans cover part of the cost of fertility treatments.

That being said, mostly because I hate walking around with an answer to my own question in my head, unspoken.

The reason for the sighing - I learned through facebook that the girl who bullied me and made my life miserable from sixth grade to 12th got married today.

It was actually her and her friends. They were all so thin and so pretty already. Their dad's were lawyers and doctors and the families took trips to New York and Chicago twice a year and bought the most beautiful clothes for those girls. You really couldn't get stiff like that in Kansas back then. Things are better now, shopping wise.

I guess maybe because I went into the gifted program with a couple of them, or maybe it was because her mom had bullied my own mom. What ever the reason. They made sure that I was not one of the cool kids. Its hard to explain what they did to make me feel that way. Comments about my walmart clothes, my braces, my boobs (I developed about three years before my class did - it was awful).

She was their ringleader. Always ready to make a look, a comment, to let everyone else know who was in and who was out. Some of her lackies were nicer, but no one defied her.

She got married today. I hear he's a super nice guy, very successful and all that.

So many people who are my age are married now and starting families. They have these smiling pictures and big houses and they look so damn happy. I know that material success has no or very little relationship to the quality of a person. But I often wonder if they've really worked any harder or been any smarter than I was.

Or if I really am that foolish and lazy to account for the disparities in how our lives are.

So I Sigh - and sigh.