Our family system is simple enough once you stop expecting fairness.
My mother, Linda, is the center of gravity. She decides the emotional weather. She names the truths. She distributes approval in rations and consequences in storms. If she is pleased, everyone is allowed to relax. If she is slighted, the entire household reorients around her wound, whether the wound is real, imagined, or strategically inflated for greater effect.
My father, Mark, is what I think of as a theoretical good man. Meaning: he has never raised a hand, never disappeared with the rent money, never drunk himself into a ruin. He went to work every day. He kept food in the house. He remembers birthdays if they are written down. To outsiders, he reads as steady and decent.
In practice, however, he is a coward.
Not flamboyantly. Quietly. Respectably. He has spent decades cultivating the kind of passivity that people mistake for peacekeeping. He tells himself he hates conflict. What he actually hates is paying the cost of standing up to my mother. So he does what many men do in homes ruled by volatile women: he calls surrender wisdom and lets the children absorb the consequences.
Then there is Bridget.
My older sister entered the world like an event and has been conducting herself accordingly ever since. She is one of those women who learned early that attention behaves like currency and never stopped spending it. When we were younger, teachers called her vivacious. Boys called her gorgeous. Older women called her spirited right up until the moment they had to actually organize anything around her and discovered that charm is not a substitute for discipline. Bridget is loud, magnetic in short bursts, careless with facts, addicted to admiration, and convinced that wanting something is morally adjacent to earning it.
When Bridget had dance recitals, the whole family became stage crew.
When Bridget had heartbreaks, the house dimmed into mourning.
When Bridget had ideas, everyone was expected to clap.
Then Kyle.