The Milkman

By all accounts, I am my parent’s daughter. Their names appear on my birth certificate, there are photos of us at the hospital when I was a shriveled little raisin of a baby, and sometimes in the right light I’m told I possess a certain attribute of theirs. But I have a sneaking suspicion I was left on their doorstep. Of course this is all in good fun - I love my parents - but sometimes I wonder if I’m the milkman’s daughter. I often joke that I don’t look like anyone in my family, only the dog since we both have curly hair, though I’d be slightly concerned if we had a similar parentage. 

Even though my siblings (generally) love me, I can’t help but feel different than them. It’s not just my body’s inability to function, but they are completely cut from the same cloth, they’re a pair, the counterparts of one another. I, on the other hand, could have been the alien child adopted and groomed to fit in on earth.

So here are a list of reasons why I should send a belated Father’s Day card to our milkman/why the dog may be my actual brother:

1) My brother and sister both have brown eyes, I have grey eyes. Let’s hope it’s a recessive gene, or else I am adopted.

2) The dog and I both use poop bags.

3) I can effectively eat my feelings through copious amounts of salad while my siblings feign allergies to all things green and grown from the ground.

4) My siblings can both sing, I am incapable of carrying a tune in a large bucket.

5) They love Tim Horton’s, I’m impartial (yes, this makes me a bad Canadian).

6) Their bowels work just fine. Mine, well, you know the story.

7) The dog and I like to run (albeit after he’s been tricked outside by yours truly).

8) They care little for cleaning their rooms and keeping tidy; my room is sterile enough to perform surgery.

And thus, I rest my case. I am the milkman’s daughter. The only complication is that I love my parents and wouldn’t trade them for anyone else and if I were the milkman’s daughter, being allergic to dairy would be highly inconvenient. Being the only person in a family to live with Crohn’s can be choppy waters to navigate, they hear me talk about bowels and ostomies way too often to be normal (Hence my brother buying me ‘Everybody Poops’ for Hanukkah a couple of years ago - ah the things you get when you have a bowel disease and an older brother). But they love me and support me and encourage me to be my gutsy self. I may be the odd one out when it comes to health in the family, but I never feel like the odd one out - and heck, that’s the most important thing of all.

Jennie