Normal

There are many ways that I have been illiterate in my life. One way that I think has had the biggest impact in my life was not having the “normal” family that most kids seem to have growing up. I never had the family where the mom bakes all the time and takes her kids to soccer practice and drives a mini van, while the dad doesn’t come home until later at night just to help his kids with their homework and tells them goodnight while him and his wife talk about their day apart. Instead, I was the girl that had the parents that always fought about my mother’s drinking problem and how she was single-handedly ruining our family while my father owned his own business and did not come home until late at night just to find my mother had left me home alone to go the bar. After that, I was that girl that had the divorced parents. Not only did I have the divorced parents, but also I was that girl that was the odd one out that lived with her father and not her mother. I was so embarrassed about my family life because I thought that I was literally the only person that had that family situation, I never thought that anyone else could have the same family problems as me, or that it was more common than what I had thought. After a couple years of living with my dad and rarely seeing my mom because of the things that she had done, I became that girl with the stepmother and new family that on the outside looked like the “normal” family that I had always wanted. For a while it was everything that I had thought it would be. We went on family vacations; we could go to family events without getting into arguments with the other side of the family; we were even that dorky family that had a weekly family game night to stay close to each other. Things in the family started to change though when my father got a new job that was located in Iowa and we stayed behind in Michigan. Our “normal” family was gone and so was the nice stepmom that I had come to know and love. Everything had