Martha. Art. Pbbblt.

Everybody in my family is naturally artistic.

We showcase my mother's oil paintings of the Vietnam landscape in rosewood frames around our living room and everyone assumes they're professional.

My brothers all sketch. One does comic style japanimation. The other specializes in animals.

Everybody in my family is naturally artistic.

Except me.

I can't make a face, a line, a circle. Nothing. I can't see something and represent it on paper. I don't eveh know where to start and I assure you I had a first class education complete with daily art classes where they tried to drill the elementary principles of drawing into my brain.

I was left with one simple conclusion thanks to first year biology:

I'm adopted.

Growing up, I found other reasons to add to this list.

My mother and brothers favor their left hand.
My nose tilts up while theirs falls flat.
They love camping and the outdoors and I hate hate hate all of that business.
They are all naturally slim and muscular and I'm, well, let's use the word: zaftig.
They found academia difficult and I always found it easy - not that I was some kind of genius or particularly motivated, I just never had to try very hard to meet the minimum requirements of whatever it took to hit the honor roll.

We can joke about it, but growing up, in the haze of teen melodrama, I genuinely imagined that I belonged to another family - one that would understand me if only I could find them. Preferably one with a last name like Rockefeller.

I'm guessing I'm not unique. Not just in my art suckiness, but also in how much I felt like an outcast in my own family, and when you're a kid spending a lot of time with your family it means feeling really, really alone.

For years, it was so easy to see the things that made us different, that I never thought about what made us the same. Not until my husband got together with my brothers' wives and had themselves a complain-about-the-family pow-wow.

Turns out we all are party poopers when it comes to Santa (who wants to admit to having a kid who falls for that line o' crap?) and giving gifts (clutter, ugh), and feelings (don't have 'em, don't wanna talk about 'em) and apocalypse scenarios (prepare or die) and a whole bunch of things.

It's just enough for me to figure: Art. Pbbblt.