Around age 15, I realized that I was privileged in one particular way compared to many of my friends.

When I was 8, my best friend… the kid next door… moved away when his parents got divorced. I learned later that the mom left in the middle of the night, taking the kids with her, because the father was abusive and a heavy drinker.

When I was 11, I’d sometimes ride my bike to another friend’s house a few blocks away. But I always had to call ahead of time, to make sure his father wasn’t “in a bad mood.” I didn’t understand it at the time, but that was my friend’s way of describing when his dad was drunk. A few years later, the mom finally left the dad. Twenty years and a lot of drugs later, that old friend of mine finally died of an overdose, but that’s a different story.

When I was 13, I’d often go to a different friend’s house after school. He happened to live near the school, so a group of other boys and I just hung out there a lot after school. We liked it there because there was never any supervision. He was being raised by a single mom who worked a lot and didn’t pay much attention to what her son and his friends did at her house. He came over to my house a few times, too, and my parents noticed that things started missing every time he came over, so they told me to quit hanging out with him. Years later, when he was 16 and in high school, that (then former) friend of mine got his girlfriend pregnant. She was still in middle school… she’d hang out at his house, unsupervised, after school.

When I was 15, a new classmate showed up in the middle of the year. She ended up being my high school crush. While chatting with her one day, I found out that she moved from New York in a hurry in the middle of the year because her father was a heavy drinker and abusive, and her mother finally had had enough and skipped town, and ended up in my little hometown.

[It was around this age I started to realize how lucky I was to have a father who was not only present in my life, but who didn’t drink or do drugs or abuse my mother. He went to work in the morning, came home in the evening, and spent time with his family. He barely even swore. I called it luck back then. Today I’d call it privilege.]

When I was 16, I got my driver’s license, and I was able to go all over town to hang out with friends at their houses. I settled into a pattern of hanging out at the same three friends’ houses. One had no father at all, and the mom was one of those “I’d rather you do it here at my house, since you’re going to do it anyway” kind of parents. She’d buy the booze and cigarettes for him and his friends on the weekend. I didn’t drink, but I’d sometimes get cigarettes from her.

Another friend had a stepfather who was nice, but about twenty years older than her (very attractive) mother. I didn’t see another older man/younger bride combo until I worked in the wealthy Chicago suburbs years later. By then, I understood what was going on there.

The final friend’s house I hung out at in high school… he was an only child and lived with his mom and dad, who were his biological parents. One was a teacher, and one was a businessman. That friend was my fellow computer nerd friend. He’s the one who got me into BBSs. He went on to graduate from a major tech university and now runs the computer system for a different university.

In my mid 30s, when I finally got on Facebook and reconnected with several dozen old high school classmates and friends, a pattern started to emerge: my classmates who had what I had … sober parents in a stable relationship who paid attention to their children … almost always ended up in stable relationships and with stable jobs as adults themselves.

I truly believe that the single biggest privilege a person can have is parents who love each other, love their children, and aren’t abusive or neglectful. If you have that in your life, you’re already on the right track.