Son of A Bitch

Like most, my family is complicated-- we're structured like two feuding high school cliques.  We come together during class (funerals, weddings, graduations, etc) but as soon as the clock strikes 12 and its time for lunch the dividing begins and the cliques reassemble.  For the purpose of not pissing people off we'll call my maternal side the Nerds and my paternal side the Jocks.  Let me also state the obvious and say that my parents were never married, but don't think any less of my father-- he did attempt to make an honest woman of my mother.  He proposed marriage right after he was caught cheating, he explained to my mother that as a Muslim man (which he had been for a whole day) was allowed to have up to five wives and he wasn't in fact cheating but courting his second wife.  Thankfully my mother didn't fall for his shit, so after she trashed the house and I packed my Barbies, we moved in with my Grandmother.

My parents split when I was five, I was the only child between the two of them but I have plenty of siblings; as the song goes "Papa was a rolling stone, and whichever woman let him in he made his hoe."  To my present knowledge, I have two brothers and four sisters on the Jock side; the latest is my sister whose name escapes me-- she's two (I think).  My youngest brother (on the Jock side) is five and I don't know his name either and although it's very sad I stopped letting my fathers indiscretions bother me a long time ago.  I remember being upset and embarrassed when I tried to explain how my brother (we'll call him Bob) was also kinda my cousin too.  For this portion of the story you may want to grab a pen and pad.  I'll start off by saying the neighborhood my parents grew up in was very small and they were young and horny teenagers.  My mother will be called Stephanie and my father, we’ll call him Tony.  So, Stephanie and Tony got together when they were very young and they made me, Tony’s wandering eye got the best of him and he started sleeping with Sonya.  Tony and Sonya had my brother Bob, Sonya had a sister named Karen who was dating a guy named James; Karen and James had a baby girl a few years later and named her Chloe. When my mother finally got fed up with Tony’s "courting" they broke up and she found comfort in the arms of the newly single James (Karen’s ex boyfriend).  My mother and James got together, had a few kids of their own and got married, thus making Chloe my sister/cousin and Bob my brother/cousin.  Did you catch all that?  I hardly have a good handle on it myself.  To recap, that makes six half siblings from Tony, two half brothers as well as two step siblings from Stephanie creating a grand total of 10 half/step brothers and sisters.  I think it’s important to say that I don’t think of any of my siblings as half or step, even the ones that I don’t really know. 

Because of how things went with my parents: my father’s cheating, and my mom fighting some of the women he cheated with, things were tense; the relationships between my siblings suffered —at least to me they did.  I wish my sisters and I had memories of Saturday mornings spent watching TV and eating cereal together but, the only thing we seem to share is our last name.  Things with my brother Bob were different, because of the whole tangled web of our parent’s relationships and the fact that my step sister, Chloe, was Bob’s cousin all three of us got to spend a lot of time together.

 I love and care for all of my siblings but there always seems to be this false sense of togetherness during “class,” and we’re all just waiting for lunch so we can return back to our opposing corners.  I’m sure I’m not the only one out there with family messiness, but I haven’t met one person who has topped this one.  So hit me with your best shot people.  I use to blame my father for not having a closer relationship with my other siblings but is it my fault now, should I have tried harder, reached out more?  Or, do I just keep on blaming Tony?