NaBloPoMo: When was the first time you realized your home was not like other people's homes?

Interesting question but i haven't really an answer... I grew up in the epitome of normal... 2 parents, two dogs, two cats, some type of rodent pet.  Both my parents worked.  My brother and I are two and a half years apart in age, though I am adopted.  Inside my home was like inside other people's homes... and it wasn't til i was in my teens that I realized how the sameness could begin to be different.  We had enough to eat, enough to wear, enough to love, enough to laugh, enough to know when enough was enough.  And i think that perhaps, even now, as an adult when those things aren't always true in the home i have now, I've never really understand how those things don't exist.  Inside our home was full of books and music, of the secrets grown-ups keep from children, the secrets children keep from grown-ups.  It was safe.  It was always safe until i presented the element of danger into our home.  I was a wild teenager, beginning a little early at age 12.    But again, not so different from any other house i knew.  I guess the first thing I noticed that was different though was that we never yelled in our home.  Raising one's voice was considered to be rude, mean... and always uncalled for. When we got in trouble... the conversations were quiet, tempered-- and perhaps because of such, my behaviours became even louder.  I'm the kind of girl who has found herself, again and again over the course of her life... always somewhat surprised to re-meet the best of me, and never truly surprised by the worst.   I have wandered so many versions of my "path" that I now know exactly where I am every time I get lost.   I know that there were pelnty of other families with one parent, or no pets, or many more siblings... or beliefs and idealogies thatcoloured the lives the lived, but I never saw it as being really different... there was enough...  and that recognistion of our sameness I think is what matters more to me tha the recognition of our differences....