Crying in the Bathroom

"One of these days, I'm going to write a book about our family; and I am going to make quite a lot of money off of it!"

That is the threat that my parents have been enduring since I was old enough to have any kind of original or hyperbolic response to their teasing. I have been raised in one of the most hilarious and misunderstood households that you could find. Sarcasm is our love language and calling each other "dork" is a term of endearment. The phrase "don't bleed in the shark tank" was something we learned along with "look both ways before you cross the street" or "never touch a hot burner on the stove".

"Don't bleed in the shark tank" meant that you never let anyone see your weakness. If someone was teasing you and you didn't like it, the best solution was to act as though you didn't care. The more you care and the more you react, the more you were "bleeding in the shark tank". That shark tank, was our family. Which, again, sounds bad, but I swear it was actually hilarious most of the time, and it taught  me to be able to laugh at myself and also to have thicker skin (seeing as I was a pretty sensitive kid - to a fault).

I was not aware that my family was in anyway special (or more accurately: peculiar) until I started spending time around lots of different people (i.e. when I started college). I would interact with my friends in a similar fashion to the way I did with my family. Playing around, being heavily sarcastic, and calling them idiots as a way of playing and teasing. I then (very quickly) encountered the problem that many of those kids (mostly girls) did not understand I was being funny. I learned pretty quickly that my family, and my idea of fun, may have indeed, not been very typical.

Things like my habit of crying in the bathroom all through my particularly hormonal middle school years, are the headline of jokes in my family. The problem is, when you relay these funny family stories to other people (I repeat: especially women) they tend to feel sorry for you. They act as though I had been brutally beaten or emotionally tortured. Which I personally find incredibly amusing, but I suppose, other people do not.

My dad always called it "preparing" us for life. I tend to agree with him (although that was not always the case - i.e. crying in the bathroom in middle school). As a result of my upbringing, there aren't too many things that people can say that will get to me, and there aren't too many things that I don't thoroughly believe I am capable of. My family was tough but loving, sarcastic but supportive, and obnoxious but memorable.

And I'll always have Crying in the Bathroom...