Have you ever stayed up late and watched those infomercials on scrapbooking? Pretty, pastel-dressed women attempt to sell you pre-packaged scrapbooking kits with all the cutesy embellishments you’ll ever need to highlight your family’s cherished memories: your son’s first soccer match, your daughter’s sweet sixteen party, your first Christmas together. Pictures surrounded by wavy borders, cutout hearts, and little pop-ups make each occasion that much more special. Thing is, what do you do if your family was, well, fucked up?

So I got this idea that there has to be a market for the dysfunctional family. With the U.S. divorce rate still close to fifty percent, I think I may be on to something. When I stand in the drugstore looking at cards for family members, I find that they just don’t quite reflect the family life I grew up with.

"Dear Father, Thank you for always being there for me. You are loved more and more with each passing day."

Yuck. How about something like, "I will never forget the number of times you came home drunk, and the day you told me that attending my college graduation would interrupt your fishing trip."

I usually settle with the most non-committal card: "Enjoy your most special day today."

Scrapbooking is the ultimate slap in the face if you grew up with a less than happy childhood. How about these scrapbook pages: "Bobby’s first middle finger incident," "The day we caught daddy sleeping with another woman," "The day my father threw eggs at my mother in a manic rage." Now none of these three would represent my family—there was no one named Bobby, and as far as I know, my father never cheated on my mother. But, well, the last one actually did happen.

I remember it vividly. It was early one winter school morning when we started to hear our mother and father shouting at each other outside of our bedrooms. This was not uncommon, as I grew up in a home where my parents both verbally and physically fought. And while my mother was very much able to hold her own, it was awful to have to watch it as a young child.

My brother and I attempted to exit our bedroom mid-hallway, but noticed something odd happening on top of the screaming. My father was throwing eggs at my mother at the other end of the hallway. Actually, he was whipping them at her—hard. My mother would dodge the eggs, and egg him on:

"You bastard, look how stupid you look. Shoot another egg!"

And he did.

We tried to make a run for it mid-throw, but quickly retracted our heads into our room so not to get pummeled. About twenty minutes later we finally managed to escape and run off to school. When I came home, my mother was on her knees at the other end of the hall where my father once stood, tirelessly wiping the yolks and egg whites off the unfinished masonite floors.

I imagine a two-page, four-picture spread of this incident in my dysfunctional scrapbook. Picture #1 on the top left-hand page would be my father throwing the eggs. Below it my mother dodging them, complete with captions and little cutout paper eggs. On the top right-hand page, me and my brother poking our heads out from the room as the blurred trail of an egg whizzes by. The bottom picture: my mother cleaning up the mess hours later.

With all of the technologies out there today, like cell phone cameras and computers, imagine the possibilities. One could literally shoot, print, caption, and share their dysfunctions within minutes of them happening. Maybe making a book like that would be therapy for some of us. Maybe it would make families see how stupid they look when they don’t get along.

Oddly enough, behind many of those scrapbooks you see on TV, or when someone pulls theirs out to show you, this stuff is going on. You just don’t see it behind the smiles. The real memories are what happened before and after.

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