Families are a weird thing. You get to pick all of the other people in your life — your friends, your girlfriend, your husband. And when you’re sick of them, you can tell nasty lies about them or cheat on them and walk out the door. With families, though, you’re in there for better or for worse, without even meeting them first — Fox reality show-style.

The worst part is, you can’t help but turn out just like the people in your family. On the surface, I look like an average person. I think I would have had a shot at being pretty normal if my family weren’t nutty nuts. But as it is, they’ve ruined me for the normal world, in ways that not even years of therapy will correct.

My mom recently showed me my First Communion picture from second grade. I looked like a fat little sausage in that white dress and giant glasses that had sparkly blue jewels on the sides. My family allowing me to wear such an ensemble effectively ruled out any chance I might have had of fitting in with all the hip seven-year-olds.

Those glasses were later broken, by the way, when — in a demonstration of just how much cooler than me he really was — my little brother convinced me to lay down with my chin on the floor so he could drive his remote control car into my face. If having a four-year-old be cooler than you isn’t scarring enough, having said four-year-old drive a car into your face certainly is.

But things my family did to me or let me do aren’t the only reasons I’m a freak. Sometimes just watching them in action was enough. For example, as a very young boy, my brother hated wiping after he took a dump and used to yell, “Wipe me!” from the bathroom until someone came to the rescue.

Once, no one came to his aid, so he got up, unwiped, to locate some assistance. He went into my parents’ room to tell my dad about the problem, and my dad, angry that my brother was walking around the house with a dirty butt, but not quite thinking the whole thing through, went to spank him. He ended up with a handful of shit. Nobody wins in this story: not the pooper, not the spanker, and certainly not me, watching it all unfold.

Things haven’t changed in the last 15 years, either. My family came up for dinner earlier this quarter and my mom, in telling a story, said that someone “sold dope.” I asked her if the dope seller actually called it dope when he sold it, and she got very defensive. “What did you want me to call it?” she asked. “Hooch? Snatch?”

At this point, my dad, who hadn’t been paying attention because he was picking something out of his teeth with the corner of a Sweet’N Low packet, realized that we’d been having a conversation and asked what we’d been talking about. “Dope and snatches,” my brother filled him in. To which my dad responded, “Oh, she’s talking about her college days again, eh?”

And this is why I am the way I am. I had a shot at normalcy in that first pure instant when I was born, but after that it was all poo and conversations about my mom’s snatch. Probably I’ll never fit in with people who don’t talk about farts at every meal or hum “Happy Birthday” instead of singing it. I’ll never be normal.

But that’s the good thing about a family. They make you weird, but you’re just like them, so they love you anyway.

Kelly Roe is a McCormick senior. She can be reached at [email protected]