normal family? is there such thing?

We had a meeting of our family book club on Friday. The book we were discussing was The Glass Castle which I highly recommend to anyone and everyone. Basically the book is about a very poor and crazy family. What makes the book so powerful is that it is a memoir. The things that happened to this family!! As they say, "You can't make this stuff up!" 

We were sitting around discussing the book. There was me, my sister, my cousin, six of my aunts and my grandma. We were talking about how angry the parents in the book made us. My aunt Dorothy turned to my grandma and said, "Thank you, Mom, for giving me a normal childhood." Which made me laugh. I turned to Dorothy and said, "You are one of 15 children. You did not have a normal childhood!" She laughed and said, "True, but at the time it felt normal to us." 

I guess that's true, even if you know that other people are living a life that is different from yours, you get used to what you grow up with and that feels normal to you. So this family that we read about in the book, though they were dirt poor and knew other people had money, didn't think that much about being poor because that is what they grew up with.

It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

The man who has food has many problems. The man who does not have food has only one problem. 

Anyways, it's a good book. Go read it. 

But back to the issue of normalcy... my aunt felt that she had a normal childhood because they lived in a house where they were fed regular meals and had the necessities and had parents who worked and took care of them. Which is normal compared to what the people in the book went through. But even if your family has all those "normal" attributes, would you describe your family as normal? What is normal? Even if it were a Steppford family, even that would be so stereotypically normal that it would be abnormal. 

As they say, "The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."