I had spent a good portion of my life feeling cheated out of the exceptional family I was told I had. I believed that if I held the same values and followed the rules laid before me, I could make that perfect family materialize. When that didn’t happen, and most of the people around me doubled down on that message—to suggest that we were not happy because I was not adhering to the rules closely enough—I felt like I was losing my mind. Now I had learned that the secret of having a happy family was pretending to be perfect.
