How many books and articles have we read about growing up in a dysfunctional family?

Parents who abused alcohol, drugs…us.  

Narcissistic parents. Negligent parents. Absent parents.

Over-protective parents. Over-indulgent parents. Overwhelmed parents.  

Confused parents. Abused parents. Amused parents.

It so often starts out badly for us in one way or another.

Somewhere on the spectrum of unhealthy, problematic, foreshadowing of complications to follow.

If our childhood were a movie, the background music would warn the audience of dark possibilities.

But in every book, every article, every home, each of us coped in our own way. Each of us took a different path. It twisted and wound its way through our childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. For many of us, the path went on to our own young parenthood. Our formative years shaped each of us differently. And with that we met all of life’s circumstances and made decisions which led to other circumstances…

and other decisions…

and on and on.

All interconnected. One step on the path to the next. One decision at one crossroad to the next.

They say that children raised in dysfunctional families fall into three categories:

One child made of glass. Fragile.

One child made of clay. Malleable.

One child made of steel. Tough.

I think they may be right…and wrong. The teenager or young adult may be that child when she leaves home but then her meandering path takes over. Where it leads may be out of fragility, out of malleability, out of toughness into limitless possibilities and permutations.

I was raised in a dysfunctional family. I was the child made of steel. At 58 the steel has become a crystal. With all the diversity of the fragility of glass, malleability of fractured light and toughness of tempered geometry. The beautiful diversity of the human condition.

Every day is a reflection of that diversity.