Unfortunately Not a Real Pony

........no one ever told me that my uncle's lifelong nickname was also a racial slur in our home country.

A racial slur for a minority he looks like, but which my mother insists we have no relation to.

How much of my father's constant bad mood was due to mental illness and trauma, and how much was due to chronic sleep deprivation and dieting?

The older I get, the more I viscerally understand how easy it would be for me to become my father, neuroses and cruelty and all.

Literary scholar in the year 2648: Palomino T. Unicorn's fiction is full of absentee fathers and violently overbearing mothers. I hereby suggest that this particular family dynamic was common in Unicorn's social circle, or perhaps even that Unicorn herself grew up with parents who fit this mold.

My ghost, hanging around academia for kicks: Ya think?

My mother bragged about how, if any of us kids needed a mental health day, we needed to just ask and she'd let us have one.

My oldest sibling begged for mental health days many times ("once a week" according to our mother, "a few times a semester" according to my sibling) and... never got one.

After the fact, our mother used "well you asked for them once a week, I couldn't let you miss THAT much school" as justification for why she wouldn't let them.

Growing up in a family where EVERYONE was twice exceptional gave me a really skewed idea of what counts as normal human ability.

I found my old Monopoly board, which I've only used a few times because the first time I played with my family, my father lost within ten minutes and threw a tantrum about how we were forbidden from playing this game.

My mother and siblings treated this like a perfectly normal thing for a fifty year old to do.

My mother told me she graduated college with honors: mostly As, some Bs.

Then when I was twenty, she brought me along to her university's records department because she needed her transcript for something.

Her GPA was 2.8, people.

I had a dream that I wrote something, and then my oldest sibling came over and started asking to read it.

When I said no, they got whiny and told me "but you can't just post something online without someone beta reading it!"

The completely illogical reasoning, the entitlement, the bratty voice... we haven't spoken in almost five years and I still remember it all perfectly, yep.

I'm sitting in the nice sunshine and thinking about how the fear of skin cancer had warped my sibling's mind so much that they spent hours a week researching different types of sunscreen and settled for importing some weird, quasi-legal hippie goop and using it EVERY time they went outdoors - even for thirty seconds to pick up the mail.

And I'm thinking about our family's genetic risk of skin cancer (zero), and the benefits of going outside (many, including a reduction in heart disease, which our family is prone to), and how it must be both emotionally fraught and physically exhausting to lather every bare inch of skin in weird smelling goop every time you leave the house, and how hard it is to make yourself do something when it's so difficult.

And I'm coming to the conclusion that, paradoxically, my sibling's orthorexic obsession with health is actively making them less healthy.