someone I know posted an RIP message on facebook today, and the message began, "As a child I lived in a small no exit street surrounded by other kids my own age. Our mums were stay at home mums with open doors so we rocked from house to house, and which ever house we were in come 5pm was where we ate dinner. It was a childhood of playing stuck in the mud out on the road while practising blowing bubbles with our gum (we throught we were so cool), making tree huts and pelting i

nnocent pedestrians with acorns...."

I didn't know the person who died - one of the other kids - but the message startled me because I was also living in that street. I was late on the block, arriving aged ten - but the experience she described was almost completely unrecognisable to me. It's still a feeling of shock and actual pride and relief to see that so clearly. That my mum had never been a stay at home mum, that by the time I arrived there I had lived in 8 other houses and been to 5 other schools, that my parents were divorced and remarried and spent most of their time shouting at each other, that I'd been living next to an erupting volcano, had walked over a village smothered in ash-mud, had seen a dead body and the insides of several typhoons, had been tended by maids and endlessly touched by strangers in the street. And I was not allowed a tree-hut! Settling in in the little cul-de-sac, which every five years featured in a national magazine as the most 'normal' street in the whole country, was the pits. I used to watch those kids out the french doors until my parents would yell at me to go make friends with them and there was nothing I hated more than being forced to go and try to somehow start a conversation with my face burning. I had no idea why I didn't fit in. 

When I read the message I had a wave of anger and jealousy and then a wave of crowing - that's REAL, that difference was real. And now less of those and more... something else. later.