by Jacqueline Dodd

Created on: August 31, 2008

I was born in 1986. This makes me a member of Generation Y, meaning I grew up in the 1990s. I've been thinking about it lately and though I love reading about the sixties and seventies - quite often fantasizing about what it would've been like to have been alive during one decade or the other - in the end I don't think there is any other time I'd rather have grown up in. Almost every memory I have of the nineties is a happy one. I lived in several different houses in a few different cities, but the majority of (and most definitely my favourite) childhood memories are from the years we spent in a townhouse in Toronto's North York. We moved there from a tiny apartment just down the road and it was the first house we'd lived in since my mum and dad had separated. My sister seemed happy as anything about the whole thing - though she's three years younger than me and didn't fully understand what was happening at the time - but I was having a rough go of it. My mum's boyfriend of several months had also moved into the new place with us - something that was going to take awhile for me to get used to - and I was not the least bit pleased. On my second or third miserable day in that house, I grabbed a couple of my Barbies and their hot pink Jeep and headed outside with my sister while my mum kept plugging away inside, organizing and unpacking things we'd brought with us from a previous, happier life.

We had just gotten started with our game when a short, chubby girl who looked to be about my age appeared beside us, seemingly from out of nowhere. She asked us if she and her sister could play. I looked past her and saw a similarly chubby, blonde haired girl - around the same age as my own sister - walking across the courtyard toward us. I told them that, yeah, sure, they were welcome to join us. And then, all of a sudden, moving into that little townhouse minus my dad, without a single shred of hope for a possible reconciliation between he and my mum went from being the worst possible thing to ever have happened to one of the best, happiest events of my entire childhood.

The two little girls became our best friends, along with another girl we met who lived two houses down from us on the end of the row. But these two sisters were always our favourite people to hang out with out of all the neighbourhood kids. Like my sister & I, they'd moved into their townhouse - which was just across the courtyard from ours - not long before we did with their recently separated mum. We

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