When No One's Family Looks Like Yours

Estrangement, Autism, and Grief (video at end)

When I was growing up, I felt like no one else had a family like mine.

For starters, I didn’t know anyone else whose parents were divorced. My father left when I was six, and my mother was so bitter and resentful that I took to repeating phrases I’d heard her say at school, the most memorable being, “My father is footloose and fancy free! He has no responsibilities whatsoever.”

It turned heads, I’ll tell you that.

Once in a while, I wished I could talk about it. I wished I could talk about the dysfunction, the shame, the little band of family held together by secrets. But how? Who do you tell?

How do you explain the way these memories are punctuated by pure goodness? You see, our family was a beautiful idea. We had dinner around the table at night. We went to Sunday school once a week. Our report cards had good grades. In the summer, we drove to the ocean and jumped in the waves.

We were a beautiful idea, but we were a mess in the nighttime. We were smashed plates. We were chaos and eggshells. We were unaddressed mental illness shrouded in a fierce kind of love.