Do you remember the moment when you first discovered that what your parents did was not what other kids' parents did, and that what you had perceived as normal really wasn't all that normal?

For me, it happened in the first grade.

Our teacher, Mrs. Mahon (whom I adored but can't honestly remember why, except that she had red hair and wore large, ornate pieces of jewelry), was trying to teach us the difference between what something was and what its brand name was.

I'd grown up, like many of you, thinking all tissues were Kleenexes, so this was quite an eye-opener. One of the tough kids in the back shook his head "no" during the entire lesson. He just knew Mrs. Mahon was putting something over on him, and he wasn't gonna have it. "You can't call it cola if it isn't Coke," he muttered.

Some years later, I'm not so sure he was wrong.

When Mrs. Mahon asked us to raise our hands and tell the class our favorite brand of soap, my hand shot up first. Not only did my family use a great brand of soap of which I was highly proud, but ... well, I liked kissing Mrs. Mahon's ass, although again I can't remember why.

She called on me. "Yesss, dear."

I shouted my answer in one long breathless stream. The sound of my voice felt like an electric bolt shooting from my chest. I bellowed, "My family's favorite soap is RAMADA INN!"

"Excuse me?" Mrs. Mahon asked.

"The name of the soap my family uses is Ramada Inn!!!!" I repeated, confused why she hadn’t heard me the first time.

There was a silence in the room, an absence of noise the likes of which I'd rarely experienced at that age, except during "sleepy time." Then, like the rumbling of a volcano, my fellow first-graders became hysterical. Some clutched their stomachs in full-on guffaws.

Even my beloved Mrs. Mahon could barely contain herself. She sat down in her chair and propped her chin on her fists to keep from laughing. It didn't work.

This was one of the worst moments of my life.

As I walked home from school that day, something kept tugging at the back of my brain. It was a new realization washing over me. My family was not ordinary.

"I'm glad I didn't tell her about the towels," I thought. Somewhere, I still have a Holiday Inn washcloth.

I climbed the steps to our front porch, pushed open the door and saw what I had always assumed was a typical home with new eyes.

Our house contained a mélange of stuff my mom was saving for some unknown purpose: piles of old magazines ("Good for wrapping things with.") garbage bags filled with coupons ("You never know when buy-one-get-two-free pretzels will come in handy."), second-hand clothes from dollar-a-bag sales that Mom hadn't gotten around to washing and ironing, then selling on consignment at the local "nearly new" shop.

On the kitchen table was a centerpiece: McDonald's ketchup packets, intermingled with Burger King mustard and Dairy Queen napkins.

I opened the fridge. The crisper was filled with tiny containers of cream and half & half, compliments of one of the aforementioned eateries.

Sifting back through my few brief years, I came upon incident after incident that no longer seemed ordinary. Did other moms open twelve tiny containers of milk to pour over their kids' breakfast cereal? Was it normal to go camping in the parking lot of 24-hour convenience stores?

There were also the lengthy chats Mom had in the kitchen. Alone.

"Who you talking to, Mom?"

She'd smile her secret smile and mutter something that sounded like, "Just checking up on things."

Luckily by the time I reached the fifth grade, I'd discovered that my mom's way of raising us was more than strange; it was funny.

All I had to do was talk about some of the things Mom did, and the other kids at my lunch table would laugh themselves raw.

"Tell us another one, please; I'm peeing myself!" they would beg.

It was a sweet fringe benefit to my truly odd childhood. At the age of 10, I became Ms. Entertainment. Despite the fact that most of my pals thought I was kidding, I was getting standing ovations in the roughest house imaginable: the grammar school cafeteria.

When my stories of how we traveled around the country in a camper stopping at every public restroom (because you never knew how long it would be till the next one) and eating at every Hardee's (dollar-off coupons) ceased to get the guffaws I needed, I just showed them my lunch.

"What do you mean a sandwich has to include bread?" I asked, sending my table into gales of laughter. "What's wrong with wrapping paper? It's all about the filling, anyway."

Typically, in my recycled Dunkin Donuts paper bag would be a few slices of dietetic American cheese, a package of Burger King mustard, two slices of bread, and little Seran-wrapped bundles containing lettuce, tomato and pickle. This was mom’s version of a sort of do-it-yourself lunch. As if these little bundles were not self-explanatory, there were notes.

"Shana Madela ... here's some lettuce for the most beautiful little girl in the world."

"My darling daughter, have some tomato and know your mother loves you."

My table went nuts. "You put this together yourself!" they would scream, laughing themselves into tears.

It was sweet while it lasted, but it didn't last. My 15 minutes ended abruptly in the seventh grade. We were almost teen-agers, and suddenly how we dressed became far more important than who we were. My having been funny last year didn't excuse my back-to-school clothes.

My fall ensemble had been purchased from the "husky" department at K-mart (remember, this was many years before Martha Stewart or Jaclyn Smith had invaded K-Mart) and local second-hand clothing stores.

I remember when one of the popular girls recognized a shirt I was wearing.

"I remember that stain!" she shrieked, pointing at the red jelly mark on my collar as though it was a badge of shame ... and it was.

I assumed what all the kids in my school assumed -- that my family was poor as hell. I was vaguely aware of the fact that we owned our home, but since most of the kids I went to school with wore brand-new clothes that they got to stain for themselves, I figured we were two steps from the poorhouse.

To this day, I don't know what exactly a poorhouse is, but every time we asked for a piece of candy that cost more than a nickel, my dad would bellow, "Are you trying to send us to the poorhouse?" It didn't seem like a place we'd want to be.

I didn't find out until I was living on my own that we had never been poor. My brother was studying to be an accountant, and for homework, he assessed the family's net worth.

"Doody" he said to me, (Don't even ask about the name.) "Did it ever occur to you that Mom and Dad own three houses, one two-family apartment building, four bungalows, a plot of land in Florida and a forest in Canada?"

"Yes," I said remembering the times I'd gone with my dad to sift through the remnants of what one if his tenants had left behind, in search of Barbie dolls, loose change or comic books.

"Well ... how poor is that?"

"You mean," I asked, feeling faint, "Mom and Dad are ..."

"Loaded," Matt said, shaking his head.

Turns out Mom and Dad were Depression babies. They never quite got over the lack of food on their plates at age three and spent the rest of their lives and a good helping of ours putting aside for a rainy day.

What the hell qualifies as a rainy day, anyway?

It wasn’t raining when the student at “Wilfred’s Beauty Academy” where we went to get cheap hair cuts by hairdressers-to-be, turned me into a bad version of “the bowl.” The following year I was turned into the bastard child of “the bowl” and Farrah Fawcette. Picture a dirty blonde salad bowl…with wings.

It never rained on “Expiration Wednesday” when I had to help Mom go through her cabinet filled with alphabetically filed coupons snipping off the expiration dates from the bottoms of all the coupons that had expired.

“They never bother to look!” mom would say beaming with pride. Then she’d giggle devilishly and resume snipping.

It definitely never rained when it was time to help Mom cram yet another trunk load of canned food into what we called “the war zone.” The war zone was the part of the garage Dad had turned into a pantry, so that Mom could stock pile enough canned goods for our family and half the neighborhood to wait out a nuclear war. At an early age, I’d assured myself that in the event of a nuclear war, I was for more prepared to die, than to spend the next fifty years eating Kosher-for-Passover corned beef hash.

But life was not without it’s little escapes.

Freshman year in high-school I made a new best friend; Wagner. Wag, as I called her, had a life filled with everything I wanted; good-looking, well dressed parents who drove nice new cars, a large clean home filled with name brand food and two older siblings who’d been wildly popular in high-school.

By the time I met Wag, I ‘d learned to camouflage my wacky home- life, by presenting myself as a rock and roll bad girl. So what if my mother wore house dresses in public? I was cool. I still went with mom to the hand-me-down shops, but now it was only to search for the most ripped up pair of Levis they had in stock.

Mom couldn’t decide whether she was horrified with my new taste in fashion or thrilled. Once I pulled out the nearly destroyed pair of jeans, she would rush them up to the counter and scream with delight.

“Look! Look! They’re damaged! They have to be half off. They’re only half here!”

Much to the dismay of Wagner’s parents, I started spending a few nights a week at her house. It was pure ecstasy.

I adored Wag. Not only was she deep, but she also had an amazing talent. She could pluck at a guitar, sing Jackson Browne and smoke cigarettes at the same time. We bonded like glue to loose paper and talked about everything from what we hadn’t done with boys to who we thought was hot on TV.

But that was not the big thrill of spending time at her house.

The big thrill was the fantasy.

After a dinner that consisted of macaroni and cheese, from real cheese not the yellow mix you add water to and bread that came from (GASP) the bakery, came bedtime.

I would slide in on the right side of Wag’s huge new bed, pull the billowy down quilt over my nose, sigh deeply and pretend for a moment, for just one crisp spectacular moment, that this was all mine.

This was my life.

I remember the first night I heard the fighting.

Wag and I had just gone to bed and I was already in full fantasy mode. My name was Cathy. I was Christian. I had straight hair and perfect skin. My parents were called Skip and Kate by their pals at the country club. We are all gloriously slender.

“You fucking bitch! “

I heard Mr. Wagner scream at Mrs. Wagner followed by many loud crashing noises from what, I later learned, were the breakable items in the kitchen being thrown at him.

“Go to hell!” she screamed back and another onslaught of crashing noises ensued.

“Why do their voices sound so strange?” I whispered to Wag.

“They’re drunk,” she said, her words disappearing in the soft sobs coming from her pillow.

“They’re always drunk.”

The next morning, I skipped breakfast, (most of the coffee cups were broken anyway) and walked the half-mile home.

I found Mom sitting on the floor in the pantry trying to cram a few more cans into the bottom shelf. She wasn’t having much luck.

She made a noise that sounded like a bird singing at the sight of me. “You’re home early, Shana Madelah! I missed you! ”

“Yeah. I umm… had home-work to catch up on.”

Mom stared at me in that way she had of letting me know she could read my mind and she could…read minds that is.

“I’m making your favorite. Scrambled eggs and Hebrew National salami!”

I smiled knowing she had only just decided to make my favorite dish when she caught the sad look in my eyes.

“Thanks mom.”

I sat down on the floor next to her and held out my hand. She pulled a can out of the grocery bag and offered it to me. I pushed hard against the cans on the shelf with my arm until they made room. Then I squeezed the new can in.

“I think we can take one or two more Mom.”

“Oh,” she said giggling with delight ,” That’s wonderful.”