My Questionable Upbriging

As long as I live, I will never understand my family!
This morning, while getting ready for another day at work, I received a rather odd text message from my mother:

FRI LUNCH AT 3 OUR ANNIVERSARY 28 YRS!

Anyone that knows my family will quickly understand my confusion. Yes, my parents are still very close after 28 years. I believe that my parents relationship is held very tight considering they have three sons together. But a 28th anniversary lunch, dinner, party, whatever makes no sense considering they have spent the last 7 of those years separated!

We have a very abnormally close family, the farther apart we get, the closer we become. I remember high school, in the months leading to my departure for college in Tucson, my family was ready to kill each other. My father and I were practically at each others throats. I thought I had the world by the balls and I didn't need any more guidance, my father knew otherwise.
My parents instilled a sense of indepenance in the three of us that can not be broken. Unfortunately, five people who constantly wanted to be alone in a three bedroom house made for a volitile situation. We started resenting each other not because of political views, morals or beliefs, but because of proximity.

The closer we are, the harder it is to breathe.

The five of us now live in three places. I live alone, the only way I see myself living. My youngest brother lives with my father, and our middle brother lives with my mother, for now. We have divided ourselves by the personalities we associate with most and the way we communicate. I could elaborate, but there will be plenty of time for that later.

You can always tell when it's family night at my mom's house. The front door is open, all the lights are on, and there is five cars in the driveway. there is the occasional sixth vehicle driven by a friend of the family or a girlfriend.

My dad and my brother riding together from their appartment would make too much sense, and no one likes to be bound by the constraints of coming and going at someone else's whim. Our lives are so dfferent that getting the lot of us to meet at one place at one time takes an act of god. We have to drive our own cars, cause chances are that we are all coming from different directions, different places.

Well, getting to a point, I didn't really know anything about my family untill I moved out of my childhood home. We weren't close untill we were apart. Sometimes the only way to keep a family together is to break them apart.

-Jake