All while growing up, I often thought to myself that I was the obvious black sheep of my family.  Not just because I was a little edgelord growing up, but just the fact that just in general I was always kind of off from the general consensus of everyone else, primarily my cousins, for whom it was like our entire generation was always measured and compared amongst one another, in a very typical Korean way.

For starters, I’m the youngest among all of my cousins and my sister, and the age difference from me to the eldest in the generation was around 20 years.  My mom is the youngest of five sisters, which means I was the youngest kid from the youngest member of the generation before, not that age is the only thing that really matters.

Unlike some of the older cousins of mine, I wasn’t born and had lived some time in Korea, and it’s clear there’s a lot of Korean-isms that I just didn’t adopt as fervently as some others did in the family.  I grew up entirely American, with video games and comic books, and developed defiance and the want to be contrarian and just generally being a smartass.  I still had respect for my elders and most of the time looked up to my older cousins, but it was primarily because they all treated me well, and did not feel an automatic obligation to give them respect and reverence for no other reason than their age.

But it was clear that I was the weirdo of the family as I entered adolescence, with my pierced ears, colored hair, typical various 90s fashions.  All at time where many of my cousins were finishing college, some were already married, the next generation impending.

Eventually, I would not finish college, I’d move far the fuck away from my immediate family, and my choice in women was decidedly not Korean.  I still maintained decent relationships with those in my family, but it was distant, and not just in a physical sense.

Today, I still have good relationships with everyone, but it’s clear just how different of a position I am from everyone else.  Lots of their kids have just begun to graduate college or are basically young adults across the board.  My niece and nephew are on the younger side of the next generation, but they still have at least 8 years on my kids.

Seeing as how we’re all adults now, I don’t feel quite so black sheep-y around them, but the fact remains that I am very much not like a lot of my family members.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations over the phone with my sister lately, mostly venting about our parents; I have my dad as my third child these days, but my sister has been dealing with a lot of my mom’s own incapabilities these days, and her general reliance on others when it comes to things that adults of my generation are all expected to be able to handle on their own.

Long story short, I came to the realization that perhaps it wasn’t just so much that I’m the black sheep of the family, as much as my immediately family of my parents, my sister and I, are the black sheep family, of the rest of our family.

There are a lot of circumstances that exist solely within our immediate family unit, that don’t exist anywhere else, in either my mom’s side or my dad’s side of the family.  My sister is a widow, I live further away from the rest of my family than anyone else.  My dad has deteriorated into my third kid from a variety of reasons where a lot of my uncles and elder men my family are all still sharp, spry and capable adults.  My parents are the only divorced couple, and my mom is oft-reminding my sister and I that she’s the only mother among the fam whose children don’t live within 15 minutes away.

My dad had a shitty relationship with most of my aunts and uncles, and he’s basically the responsibility to my sister and I, primarily me due to proximity, and despite the fact that for decades, I’ve tried to tell him the importance of making and having friends and people in his life besides just his kids, but he’s so old thinking and set in his ways, that he is where he by no fault of anyone by himself.

My mom is the divorcee that basically got walked all over by my dad, but she was so desperate to get away from him that it was still worth it to her in the end.  But she’s in this awkward position where she’s all along among her sisters, whose own adult children all live within the same county as they are, and is often this odd wheel that I’m sure she feels self-conscious about, but my sister and I aren’t going to pick up our lives and move back to Virginia solely so she can feel good about herself.

As a result, my mom ends up leveraging a lot of assistance from our cousins, and my sister and I feel like we can sense the general annoyance and resentment from them, when they have to help out our mom because they’re close and local, but it’s not like we can always do things from afar.  My mom shoulders some responsibility for needing so much assistance too, because not unlike so many elder Koreans, they simply hit a ceiling in which they stop wanting to learn how to do things and generally function without needing people to hold their hand.

So ultimately, it’s not just me being the weirdo of the family here, because it’s evident when I talk about it and write it all out, that it’s not just me, but my immediate family that all seems to have a lot of baggage that nobody else does.  Why this matters is that my sister and I are often given a lot of unsolicited advice from other family members who can’t relate to our circumstances, and their opinions only hold so much weight.  As is often spoken out there in the world, you just never know what kind of battles every individual is going through, and in the case of my sister and I, nobody in our extended families can really relate to what we’re going through, and not getting any grief for the things they may or may not get drafted into doing in the name of family, would greatly be appreciated.