In common

The four of us were the best of friends.

We traveled Europe together, went to University together, had late night talks about old boyfriends together. We were like four peas in a pod.

Ten years later, some of us are married, some of us have kids. We see each other still, from time to time, and when we do, I realize how different we really are. How different our lives are now.

One of us did not marry, did not have kids, did not end up living in the same city as the other three. The others did. Two of the others married very financially successful husbands, and now live in very large houses, each employ a cleaning lady and neither work outside of the home.

The third other, is me. Sometimes I feel different from the two others, in that they have money and options, and a certain status financially that I do not have. For the first time tonight, I felt like I was in a different, I don't know, level than them. Different class. In the Jane Austen version of the world, I may not be a "conexxion" worth maintaining. I did not like it. They have the financial ability to do certain things that I cannot do, or probably never do. They own gigantic houses.

This difference is not one that is due to personal professional success. In fact, neither of them are really working right now, where as I am. The difference is solely due to who they married. Had either of them married differently, they could have been more like me.

I am not really jealous, I just feel sort of silly sometimes in the areas of the conversation, when they talk about the interior designer that they have coming in, or the landscape designer, or the cleaning lady, or all the new furniture they bought. I don't have that in common, and they have that in common with each other.

So it is silly really, it should not matter, but it kind of bugs me, since we started off all as equals in University, and now we are just not. I don't know if they judge me, or feel sorry for me, I am sure they don't, yet it still bugs me. I am tired of having to justify in my mind that our house works for us, that it has many good points that offset the fact that it is relatively small, that I would rather live here, with all the side benefits, than in a gigantic house somewhere else. Would I really? Or am I just justifying it, given that there is not really a choice. Well there is a choice, but that would mean having a mortgage again, and possibly having to work full time, and most importantly, having to do all the little things around the house that make it your own, like painting and landscaping and hanging new closets and sewing new draperies, and everything that it has now taken us almost 6 years to do. So no. I don't really want to move. Or maybe I am just justifying it again.

And I don't really want to be that large scale consumer that leaves a large scale footprint on the earth, due to my large scale house.

Or so I tell myself.

Really it should not matter. But I still sometimes secretly wish that we were more the same, that we all had more in common. It is the common-ness that makes you feel connected to this world, to other people, to friends.