Am I Really?

Okay, so this has been a year of learning stuff about myself.

I learned that I can control my attitude and my tongue. I learned that I began to grind my teeth. I learned again (like I do every year) that I am desperately and nauseatingly in love with my husband.

I also learned that I am a leader.

I spent loads of time trying to be a leader when I was younger. And I never could quite pull it off. It was pathetic in a way, the way I kept desperately trying so hard. Every election, prior to 2009, I entered, I lost (and in all honesty, not always with grace.)

This year, with no effort on my part (and not a little surprise) I was nominated and elected to the PTA Executive Board. I mean, I didn't put my own name in. I didn't ask anyone else to nominate me, and when asked if I was going to put my name in, I laughed a nervous little laugh, and said, "No. I like the cheap seats, thanks."

I had fully embraced my being an Indian, and had fully given up hopes of being a Chief. I am not Chief material, people. I don't do tact and diplomacy so well, and I have a tendancy to totally mess up and drop the ball on big important things.

I even went so far as to prove my unworthiness by offering (albeit while laughing and joking around) the other members of the PTA Smarties, asking that you "be sure to let me know when they start working." And I made fun of myself, and made moderately adult jokes about some of the Dads at school. I made it clear, I thought, that I don't necessarily play well with others, and I certainly have a ribald sense of humor--ribald, slightly vulgar, and certainly off center sense of humor.

None of that worked.

They nominated and elected me anyway.

I merely bowed to the inevitable, and am hoping that I can escape that fate with only a one year tenure.

I am alternately delighted with the opportunity for change and overwhelmed with the responsibility (not to mention the aforementioned lack of tact and diplomacy.)

What all this leads up to is that, I'm hearing more and more often that I am "a leader." First, it was at work, with a flat-out statement by the Head Cheese. Today, it was from the Howler's teacher.

How did this happen? Well, how the conversation turned to that, I can answer--how these people got this crazy idea about me, I have no clue.

As for the conversation: the magician was late in arriving at the school. Mrs N asked, not in a mean way, if it was from poor planning or what? So I gave her the Reader's Digest condensed version of the PTA Drama Trauma from February, March, and April. She asked who, then, is next year's President? I told her, and listed the executive board for her, rolling my eyes at my own name.

She said, "But that's good, right?" and I said, "Uh, no. I'm doing it because there's really no one else to do it."

And she said that it couldn't be true, "You're such a leader."

"You think? ~snort~" I replied.

"Well, sure you are. Mrs S (the principal) has commented more than once the good things you've been doing this year, and how successful they are. You're a leader whether or not you know it."

In thinking on this, it gives me the giggles--partly because I'm apparently doing a good job at whatever it is I'm doing, and partly because I'm just vain.