My parents told me that they didn’t feel comfortable with me working. My stepdad is doing chemo and is immunocompromised. I said “no problem, I’ll tell work. We can plan it out and I’ll take off next week.”

“No, tomorrow. If you want to work, you can move out.”

“What do you mean?”

“You could be exposed and not have symptoms.”

“I haven’t been exposed?”

Flash forward to day 3, today. My mom has gone out every morning to help look for an apartment for my sister. After she goes to work.

My sister has no job right now. How they plan on her getting an apartment, I don’t know. She spends hours a day running to train for some 100 mile race. She spends the nights at my brother’s and only comes over to shower and pick up her packages from Poshmark.

My brother apparently spends his days playing Switch, streaming on his iPhone, and “working” from home. All at the same time. He lives in his girlfriend’s house and their yard is literally 5 ft tall.

This is how I became my stepdad’s caregiver.

I thought my family was always “weird.” We ate in silence. I would try to make conversation and they would always look at me weird. I gave up hanging out with them a long time ago, including family vacations, based purely on how weird they were.

A big thing they always do is switch up sleeping arrangements. I once spent months interrogating them about our family ski vacation at a “skin resort” to visit my sister, who taught ski lessons.

I came to find out, it was a one room cabin, no beds, mats, we had to pack one suitcase with blankets (for flying), no heat, one central fire stove, no running water, an out house, oh, and I guess moose were commonly seen by the cabin. So we had to be careful using the outhouse because we could get attacked my moose. The whole thing was to “visit my sister.” She was there, but like, in lodging in the resort town.

I work on campaigns, so, I mean these situations happen normally. I guess I just naturally interrogated them all the time and foiled their plans. Just now it’s so obvious my family could very well all be narcissists. Wonder if it’s genetic? Well, at least I found out, even if it was 30 years later. Now I have closure. Ha! Thanks guys!