Inez, My Childhood Days and being Sociable

This week I have had some very vivid images of my childhood in my head. It all started when I saw one of my friends with the book, "The Help". I told her the book very much describes my life as a child growing up with a maid whom I loved as much as my own mother and grandmothers.
Then, last night, as I cooked cubed steak in a little bacon grease I could not help but think of Inez again. The smell of this meal just took me back to many years with Nez, as we called her, cooking our dinner before she left for the day and knowing it was gonna be so good with her southern gravy. She was very much a part of our family and all my memories of her are good. This is the only good picture I have of her :

And then there are other things that have taken me back to childhood days...I am always asked by people who did not watch me grow up; "how many brothers and sisters I have" and about our birth order etc.. and as I tell them that I was the middle child, this picture comes into my mind:
always in the middle, anyway you look at it, being middle child and middle girl of 5 :) I have come to love my position even though "middle child" gets a bad rap and there were definetly issues in getting to my present peace of mind about it. I think learning and accepting that God is sovereign has been the key.

Also of late, I have been a newcomer on Facebook and have found so many high school friends that I used to know. There is one person I have not found on there and it is my senior year high school boy friend. Funny thing how you associate someone with who they dated back then.

We went to Homecoming and so many dances that senior year..
And the Camellia Ball was one dance that I realized how uncomfortable I was being in a leadout situation. Back then in my life, if your parents were in these social circles, then you automatically had to be in these organizations that were like mini sororities. I liked seeing my friends and all but did not like "the snobbishnish" of it all. I became a bit of a rebel or you might say a blacksheep about the whole issue of belonging. I wanted to be accepted for who I was and not for who my parents were or what they made me do. And a whole other issue for me personally was "looking the way they thought I should look". I did not go the hippee route but instead started overeatting. It was not a fun time for me and today I look back on it all and regret that lots of my high school and college days were spent eatting for fun instead of eatting for nutrition. Soon after college I got a grip on the eatting, started walking and running and thankfully have not had those issues as much although I confess I still eat for fun many times :)
So also of late to bring me back to my childhood was hearing about The Montgomery Debutante Ball taking place. I DESPISED that whole scene of having to be one of the debutantes but I did it for my parents

I learned to smile and make conversation and be sociable to those who are not like me. I found out that as much I want to be accepted just as I am, the person I usually am talking to probably feels the same way. I learned to make friends with the most unassuming people and have found I enjoy all kinds. And the status of one's parents does not make a person who they really are inside. There were many good things that those social situations did for my growing up stages.

One organization I HAD to participate in was fun in lots of ways and there are many people I love that still really enjoy their membership in these groups.
We all have our groups, don't we? We just get to pick and choose which ones we want to be with now.
Would I do the debutante stuff over again, if I had a choice, most definetly NO! But I learned from those days and some of the things I learned from being in all those things, like being sociable, are not all bad.