My name is Chelsea Ward. I’m 36 years old, and according to my family, I’ve been a disappointment since birth.
I grew up in one of those small towns where everyone knows your grandparents, your business, and what you had for lunch three Sundays ago. It looks charming on postcards—white picket fences, church bells on Sunday, kids riding bikes until the street lights come on. But when you’re the family letdown in a place like that, it feels less like a town and more like a glass box. Everyone can see you, judge you, and gossip about you in the serial aisle.
I’m the middle child of three.
My parents are textbook conservative and deeply religious. Dad’s the strong, silent type—always working, never talking about feelings. Feelings, in his world, are something you bite down on until your jaw aches. Mom is the traditional homemaker, the kind who quotes how she was raised like it’s scripture. She keeps the house spotless, the meals hot, and her opinions on my life even hotter.
They never came right out and said, “Chelsea, you’re the family failure.” They didn’t have to. It was there in the sighs. The glances they exchanged over my head. The way my name only came up as a cautionary tale.
My older sister Allison is 40 and practically made out of goldplated expectations. She married this quiet, pretty man who smiles a lot but never really says anything. They have two boys who treat contact sports like a religion and bruises like trophies. Allison sells cars at the local dealership and talks about it like she’s saving the world one SUV at a time. She loves to lean on the edge of her chair at Sunday dinners and tell me how to get my life together—which is funny, because she has no idea what my life actually looks like to her.
To her, I’m still the weird middle kid who cries too easily and can’t catch a football.
Then there’s my younger brother Josh, the baby of the family. I moved out when he hit his teenage years, so most of what I know about him now comes from adulthood. He’s not a bad guy. He’s just soft, pampered. It’s easier for him to laugh along when my parents and Allison take jabs at me than risk becoming the target himself.
He got married at 19, had a huge, glittering wedding the whole town talked about for weeks, and now he has three kids.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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