I spent most of my childhood asking for stories about my parents trying to build a picture of them I could live with. I didn’t know I was doing it at the time but I became so hooked on these stories they became reality to me and they would be the things I would tell people when asked about my family. The fact that my brother was a dead-head traveling the country, not that he was never around. As I got older my mom would tell me random horror stories about my dad that I learned were true and explained the gaps in all the other fatherless stories. I remember assuming that all dads were bad. That it was somehow so normal that I didn’t need to talk about it