First Step - Realize and Accept this is not the typical Jewish Family...then get a script for xanax....

My family...definitely not the typical Jewish family...yes I am finally ready to admit it....I have a Meshugeh family! Yes, its true... I've been thinking recently about my childhood and the signs that I perhaps overlooked...hmm, let's see I'm remembering the house where I grew up..at least for most of my life. The more I relive some events , the more I realize that what you think is normal as a child , you see as seriously messed up when you are older! I can see each room of that house in my mind, memories of my family came flooding back. Ok, so it was dysfunctional but who cares I can pretend we were normal. Well we were normal at one time. A time that seemed like one hundred years ago ...

Thinking about the kitchen I could still smell the old coffee(thats been warmed up 3 or 4 times in the past day or two!) and cigarette aroma that lingered in the house, not to mention the dog hair that still clung to every sofa cushion in the house....The living room I have to laugh I can still see the window blinds,half drawn up and one side still clinging to life fixed in the way only my mother could fix things..with a toothpick and tape. Yes, my mother was crafty. Give her a roll of tape and she could fix just about anything, or better yet hand her her staple gun and she was in business. My dad liked the drill. Everything could be fixed by drilling a hole , the “easy to hang” paper towel holder definitely needed to be drilled in the kitchen wall. Doesn't everybody drill holes for paper towel holders? Things that seemed funny then were only clues of just how abnormal my family was, but did I care? Not then. Who would have known that years later the true craziness of my family would creep out.

Ah..the dining room...thoughts of all the dinners my mother made only for us to make fun of cast a shadow ... The funny thing is, when I was a little girl I thought she was the best cook in the world. As I got older, I realized that macaroni and cheese baked with ketchup really wasn't all that special..and meatballs..I believe they are suppose to be cooked completely. It wasn't all bad, I remember some of the good dinners we had as a family, a real family at least I thought. The chairs had been redone in some retro faux studded leather that was hip in the early 1980's. My mother had this great idea when she was in one of her crafty modes. “I'm going to mirror the wall in the dining room” she said to us one night. “It will make the room look larger!” My mother believed for some reason that she had to mirror rooms to make them look larger. We all trekked down to the local home improvement(ok maybe it was Kmart) store one weekend where she found just what she was looking for. “Ah, yes that's it!” She exclaimed.

She bought about 75 small square glass mirrors to put up on just one wall of the dining room, easy enough we all thought. Now no shopping trip would be complete without either changing the price sticker or arguing with the salesmen about why an item was on the wrong shelf and she should have it for the price on the shelf, whether it is wrong or not!

That was my mom, the quintessential South Philly Jewish woman, always looking for a bargain or how she could get a bargin by pulling one over on the salesperson. Don't get me wrong my mom wasn't a thief , “Stealing the extra rolls on the table at a restaurant or taking the extra sugar packets was not stealing!” she would tell me. Besides she learned from the best, her mother. (I'm not even going to start with my grandmother yet that deserves a few pages!)She just believed that she should get what was fair and deserving to her, and as she said “these prices are all made up!”

We all piled into the red Thunderbird that my dad gave my mom the last Christmas, yes Christmas. Although we were a “nice Jewish family” it seems we liked to celebrate Christmas a whole lot more than Channukah. Once we got home my mom couldn't wait to tear into those boxes of mirrors and start putting them up ...with super glue. Super glue was also my moms best friend, but she was soon to find out that she would have to use something made specially for this type of wall hanging.

It was at dinner one night that we all discovered why superglue was not the best choice for hanging the mirrors. While passing the rolls(yes they were from the restaurant that we ate at the night before) my mom turned to the wall she was sitting next to only to have a finger sliced open by a falling mirror. Two of the mirrors clung to life on the wall , dangling by the shear strength of the superglue as one fell on my mom's hand.....Ah its only going to get better from here!