An Unlikely Family

To all who venture here,
All my life I can remember wanting a real, normal, family. I read books like "Little Women", "Little Men" and even "Grapes of Wrath" showed family working together to survive. I can remember living with my paternal grandmother and loving it. All the cousins around and aunties and uncles. My parents were divorced; both were judged to be lacking in the parenting department, and so Grandma took care of us. I felt really loved, even though I missed my mother emensely. My Father was like a big kid, tickling us all the time til we cried, and piling us up in a 3 kid sandwich and laying on us. He was 6'6" so this wasn't fun, especially since I was usually on the bottom! Then Father married a woman 15 years my senior. I was 5 or so. She turned out to have even less parenting skills and was a very scary, abusive, psycho. The fact that Father did not protect us says alot. It was a long nightmare, interrupted by 18 months in foster care for me when I was 6. The care I received in foster care was calm and capable. I wanted to stay there forever, but was sent back to the nightmare at age 8. I left one month after I turned 18; tired of the molestation by my Father and being beat up by my stepmother. I went back for my sister, and then my brother, as soon as I was able.
The point is that I survived miraculously, fairly OK. My sister and my brother did not get to see "normal", and so they have had to try and figure it out themselves. I love them both very much. I understand them, when others may not. My brother always hugs me a little too tight, and has a heart that is so big. My sister swings back and forth between her truth, and what really happened; she lived with lies all her life, and that became normal. I see the struggle in her. Then I have my other sister who grew up with my mother who was clinicly depressed over the loss of her other 3 children. I also have a foster sister who my Mom and "Dad" loved by choice. They are all my siblings forever, scars and all. Whether we can survive, the loss of our chosen parents "Mom and Dad" remains to be seen. We are fragile at best at staying a "family" and that is sad, because after all "all I've ever wanted is a normal family". My children remind me often that I have broken the cycle of abuse, and that we are a pretty normal family. We are small, but I hope significant in the path my posterity shall take. Some things take a lifetime to accomplish, and somethings will have to wait for the next act. I guess I shall have to leave it to Him... Love's Eternal, Kim