This post contains very personal and wacky human behaviour. It’s not intended for everyone.

Watching John from Cincinnati this morning, I imagined my family drama would be on HBO if it were to play out on the small screen; because that’s where all dysfunctional families live.

For years I was ashamed of my family’s unconventional attitudes, nothing / no one seemed quite right – these days I just embrace the quirkiness.

Growing up, I was convinced I didn’t belong with my parents; I assumed I was stolen or switched at birth.

I liked the idea of being stolen the best, a lot of times I’d imagine the joy of my real parents finding me after years of searching and anguish, only problem was I decided I’d miss my siblings. I couldn’t imagine them not being my siblings and besides I couldn’t leave them with my parents, I’d pretend they were stolen too – which made my fantasy a bit complicated.

My brother (I have three of those) tried to kill himself when I was seven years old – he hung from the ceiling for a few minutes before my mother found him. My mom said he tried to jump off a ledge when he was six. But that’s not the screwed up part; years later when his girlfriend tries to dump him he’ll threaten to kill himself and give her my sister’s number for reference, just in case his girlfriend thinks he’s kidding.

My family’s dysfunctional traits seem to rob off on others too; my parents decided that to be more sociable (read normal) we were going to host an exchange student. For days leading up to her arrival my mom would encourage us to act “normal”. My father slept at home more and we’d have breakfast in the mornings together. We went to the beach on Sunday afternoons.

Not sure where we went wrong but after living with us for a year, the exchange student, decided she wasn’t going back. Instead she became the fifth wife of a Rastafarian who was rumoured to be a wanted man in many countries; she and her sister wives helped run his I-tal restaurant (which was rumoured to be a front for drug trafficking), they also would sit around and loc each others hair.

My father’s contemptuous affair and my parents’ subsequent divorce in a way, for me, was a chance for us to work at being normal. My disdain for the stepmonster was tempered with hope that I could become a normal child again – not someone who like Dexter, had to learn social skills (Unlike Dexter, I don’t have urges to sadistically murder people… yet).

It would turn out, I was sadly mistaken, nothing good would come out of my father’s infidelity.

The stepmonster, Alice was in a class of her own – my life before was mellow compared to the madness that’ll transpire.

She was convinced some deities or gods or something called ‘Good Friends’ (not to be confused with the cereal from KASHI although…) talked to her. She made a shrine in her bedroom for them, which is where they’d make contact with her. She managed to get some desperate idiots to believe her, her prophecies for/to them somehow always seemed to benefit her.

They’d wear white long robes for their meetings, light candles and rub themselves with Florida Water Cologne. Sometimes they’d dance naked around the light before she told her prophecies.

The bizarreness, to quote Posh was ‘major’. I’m actually surprised that none of the adults around at the time said/did nothing. There were so many things that happened in that family that baffles me the more now as an adult. Like how my ‘aunt’ Bea slept in the same bed as my father and Alice…

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