The other day a colleague told me that she gave her daughter a pair of roller skates for her seventh birthday.

It made me think of a tale I have been told about when I was three. My neighbors had a skateboard, and I was determined that I would have one too. My parents told me I could have a skateboard when I was “a big girl”. Sometime later – not sure if it was days or weeks – they told me I could do something myself because I was “a big girl”. I replied, “No, because if I was a big girl, I would have a skateboard.”

Or when my grandma came to visit my family, she took me to my bedroom for a nap – but not long after that, I reappeared from my room and told my mom, “I put grandma down for her nap.”

Let’s not even touch the fact that by the time I was three, I already had my second boyfriend.

I was a take-charge, personality-filled leader then.

I don’t know what happened after that – it is like I became a different person, something in me snapped before I turned four.

But when I was three, I was very alive and a force to be reckoned with.