Standard UK 10

I asked a group of my friends if they felt like grown ups or did they still feel like kids. I think it has a lot to do with money myself, I think that driving around in your own car, with your stereo on, windows down, deciding where you go and what you do, must make you feel more grown up. I hate having to catch a bus or wait for a friend so I can go anywhere. I think it must be all about money - or maybe I just fall in to the "grass is always greener" catagory.

The girls don't really agree with me, but that's because they have cars, and holidays, and they go on golfing weekends with their friends. They order lattes in cafes - and call them Coffee Shops, and buy clothes in stores where someone is paid to help them choose. They have carpets in their kitchens and they have utility rooms. Their houses have porches and double garages. It's easy to think it's not about money when you have money.

I know a lot of people that don't have what I have and would love to be in my position. I own my own house, I will have virtually no debt at all in 4 months - both my loans will be paid off with only a £400 credit card remaining - and that's not technically a debt, it's a work in progress :lol

I have a nice car (which I still can't drive), I have a beautiful child, a tall and handsom husband with an exquisit Southern drawl, a trusty dog, a big garden, two parents - four if you count their husbands and wives - well ok, maybe that part isn't perfect.

But I'm an aunty, I'm a mother, I'm a wife, I'm employed. I am slim and mostly healthy, I am not tall but not short, in fact, I am a Standard UK 10. That's what it says in the back of my jeans.

I noticed it tonight when I was in the bathroom. I am a Standard UK 10. I've been saying it in my head for half an hour now. It some how defines me in a way I hadn't thought about. It says I am an average height. A decent weight. It says I am English. It says a lot more about me then I thought it would.

It doesn't say I am insecure, or that I am funny, or that I never knew where I was going in life. It doesn't say that I lock the bathroom door even when there is no one in the house. It doesn't say that I always wanted a flat in a big city like LA - but I also wanted a country cottage with roses. It doesn't say I have an above average IQ, or that I am afraid of dead spiders, or that I often wish I was a dog so on windy days I could run very fast and hear the wind rushing past me. It doesn't say I often dream I can fly, or that I believe in ghosts. I doesn't say my dearest wish when I was a child was that I would wake up one day and be an American child, living in a pretty little town with a high school and a cheerleading team and a football team, and pumpkins on the step in October and friends that had cars so we could go to drive in's and do all the stuff they do on TV.

It says I am ordinary. And I am so far from ordinary, I couldn't reach it with a stick. I don't like being a Standard UK 10.

Everyone feels like they are special and different, I've heard people saying that they always knew they were different - well they are, so are we all, we just like to think that everyone else is the same and we are the odd one out because it makes us somehow more special, more different, and no one in the world wants to be ordinary. Even the lowly poor folk I have known have confided that they didn't think they would turn out the way they are, circumstances conspired to make them that way. Well didn't they conspire against all of us? I wonder how many of us would have been truely great if we'd been able to "be all you can be"? I guess we'll never know.

But I know one thing for sure - I am not a Standard UK 10.

My jeans are.


Stay happy.