Hello, please bear with me, I find it hard to articulate this issue, but it’s been bothering me for a long time.
in essence I don’t feel like I belong / fit in, especially as a family unit everywhere. I am a people person. I love people, and company, and I’m fairly confident socially and also probably too loud. I’m a professional now but previously a sales back ground which suited me down to the ground. I’m from a very staid middle class family and although they are wonderful, they are very straight, and proper and don’t like to socialise and are very quiet. Parents and sister all educated privately. I went to a really awful state school, where i was bullied for being posh until I practiced fitting in, and then had a great and wild time growing up in the nineties.
DH is from northern working class background. Trade. The only person in his family to have a job, own his own house etc. only one to still be married to mother of his children. He also has a diagnosis of ADHD.so he’s hectic and also loud. And full of northern working class banter. He works very hard, he loves his kids, and we have a good life and managed to live in a very nice house in a naice village, in the south, having pulled ourselves out of the rough town we went to school in.
But we don’t fit in. The demographic has changed here from when we arrived. It’s gone from little village of farming community, to full of very nice city people who have escaped London. A 3 bed semi is £400k. It’s people with corporate jobs they pretend to hate with an artistic hobby. Like being in a band or painting. Everyone is nice and friendly but then we see that they are all meeting up in groups and have bbqs at the weekends with the kids and we’re not invited. The kids all have sleepovers and my girls are desperate to go but obviously because we don’t fit in, my DC are excluded too (I must add they do get lots of play date invitations and I reciprocate etc and I always get feedback that they are well behaved etc, and school say they are well behaved). But it’s not the same when their friends are all off on camping trips and family holidays etc
we have lots of friends ourselves individually, but none with children the same age as ours (we had children late and our old friends have mostly grown up children now). Yes we could move back to our old town, but we don’t fit in there either. The crime rates are high, and some of our friends there, while lovely, are not raising their children the way we would like to have role modelled for our children.
On my side their are no cousins or other children, and it’s just not a fun environment for children. It’s so stuffy and staid. And DH’s side is full of conflict ( not with us) and drama and behaviour we don’t want our children around.
i yearn to have a family group or some friendship group for days out, and camping trips and picnics and rounders and general innocent childhood fun. But I just can’t seem to provide that and it’s breaking my heart.
im so lucky to have my mum, and dad and lovely sister, I feel awful for feeling like this. But I just don’t fit in anywhere. Everyone says ‘just be yourself’ but then they don’t really want you to be. And now my poor DC are suffering….
can anyone relate or suggest what I can do to help?
thank you for your patience if you got this far