Misfit

I don't know if it is a universal feeling, or just something I feel, but all of my life I have had moments where I felt like a misfit. That little girl in the mismatched sweater and skirt holding a rifle with her uneven braids could have something to do with it.

I was always a little out of step with the world. It was just a thing. I got used to it. I made friends who I didn't feel like a misfit with.

I made the whole thing worse for myself by getting pregnant at fifteen in the tenth grade. While my friends were finishing high school and going to college, I was learning to be a Mommy, and finding out that children sometimes don't have the skills to make a marriage work.

A divorced twenty-one year old is another kind of misfit. I was comfortable with being uncomfortable by that point in time.

Then at twenty-six, I met Cecil, and at twenty-seven, I married him. I didn't feel like a misfit anymore. There was someone who I fit with, all my strangeness and mistakes and sharp edges and easily bruised heart. While I had always had friends that I never felt like a misfit with, they had their own families and other friends, and so the lonely moments were always filled with my sense of otherness. Cecil was mine - twenty-four seven three sixty-five.

There is an intimacy in a marriage done right. A sense of belonging, of completeness. It is a wonderful thing, and a devastating thing to lose.

I feel like more of a misfit than ever. I forgot how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, and I am having to learn how to do that all over again. I will learn. And I will try to focus on how lucky I was for thirty-five years instead of how sad I am now.

What does this have to do with my books? I have created a world where no one is a misfit, because everyone finds their people. And those people fill the potential misfits empty moments with a sense of belonging. Because isn't that all most of us are looking for? To belong? My faith tells me I belong to God, and God doesn't see me as a misfit. But sometimes, all of us need earthly reassurance. The people of Belle Terre in my historical novels, and the people of Bayou Beni in my current day novels are always reaching out to each other, to make sure that the sense of belonging is the constant in everyone's lives.