“Our House,” the 1982 smash-hit by the English ska-band Madness, is one of those uber-ubiquitous songs that have simply felt like they’ve always existed. I doubtless first heard it covered on Fraggle Rock or Sesame Street or some such when I was some impossibly young age (though Google has been unable to confirm this for me). It’s the sort of song that’ll pop in your head at random intervals—fragmentary, incomplete—and suddenly you’ll find yourself, without warning, singing softly to yourself, “Our house, in the middle of our house, our house…” over and over, while in the shower, or driving to work, or walking the dog, till finally you snap and go, “Just what are those confounded lyrics?!”

I’m pretty sure it was just such a moment last month that finally sent me down the YouTube wormhole to find the actual words and learn who wrote it. Imagine my delight to discover the original song and video were even more infectious than I remembered:

It is a truism to the point of cliche that the yearning for Eden is really just a sublimated yearning for one’s lost childhood—or is it the other way around? In either case, that yearning is in fact the main theme of “Our House”: not just celebrating the joy of childhood, but mourning the loss of it.

The first verse ends, after all, with “sister’s sighing in her sleep” and “brother’s got a date to keep/he can’t hang around,” indicating the discontent already creeping into the kids as they get older, before they’ve even finished growing up. Likewise, on the second round of the chorus, the second-singer says in counterpoint, “Something tells you/That you’ve got to move away from it,” no matter how much you love your family, no matter how much you already know you’ll miss them.

The third verse in turn finishes with mum sending the kids to school “with a small kiss,” noting “She’s the one they’re going to miss/In lots of ways,” cause of course they’ll miss her in lots of ways: they already know they’re gonna have to move out one day, no matter how much they sincerely love her, no matter how much they owe her—that “Our house, that’s where we used to sleep,” is something that will soon only ever be thought of in the past tense.

Then over the bridge, the lead-singer lays out the main theme in spitfire fashion:

”I remember way back then
When everything was true and when
We would have such a very good time,
Such a fine time, such a happy time
And I remember how we’d play
Simply waste the day away
Then we’d say nothing would come between us…”

For the obvious implication here is that now nothing feels true or stable anymore, that he and his siblings no longer have a “very good time” or a “fine time” or a “happy time” together at all, cause plenty of things did come between them, no matter how much they once swore otherwise.

That is, the loss of childhood isn’t just our own personal Fall from Eden, but our own Fall of the Tower of Babel, when the earth became divided and we could no longer talk to or understand each other.

And the real tragedy is that it had to be this way! Adam fell that man might be, and men are that they might have joy, but that still means we first had to fall—which really just means we had to grow-up. Yes, we must all become as little children to inherit the kingdom of heaven, but that also means we all must at some point cease to be little children in the first place. Nothing can resurrect unless it first dies, nothing can be exalted till its first abased, and no one can return home till they first leave it. Indeed, per LDS doctrine, all of human existence is us having to leave behind our Heavenly Parents for our various mortal probations—to leave behind from “Our House/In the middle of our street,” in the center of the universe—no matter how much it broke our hearts, no matter how necessary it was for us to grow.

Yet still the song remains irresistibly joyful—and that because of, not in spite of, its melancholic undertones. That is as it should be. “Yea, I say unto you, my son, that there could be nothing so exquisite and so bitter as were my pains,” reads Alma 36:21, “Yea, and again I say unto you, my son, that on the other hand, there can be nothing so exquisite and sweet as was my joy.” The pain and the joy go hand in hand. Opposition in all things and all that. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you—for you to return to—in our house, in the middle of all things.