Extra blob

Within my preschool-aged memories lives this montage. A general scene with many versions…variations mainly in seasonal dress. My people, snug together in our living room, a modest rectangular space done up in 1960s lima-bean tones. Banter and warmth. For the grown-up set, bowls of hard candy mix and cocktail peanuts on a side table. Narrative snippets all weaving together in a variegated tapestry of conversation. Cigarettes congregating on chrome ashtrays, all chummy. Raised hearth of a faux fireplace filling the role of extra seating.

There are some family members with laughs too outsized to contain…they laugh with heads thrown back in a way that captivates me. I just keep lolling on the carpet, puppyish. Sponging up this warmth. Eventually the moment arrives to haul a battered nursery rhyme book to someone’s lap and point out the highlights which must be read to me. “Taffy Was A Welshman, Taffy Was A Thief” makes the short list.

My kin, a people of family bondedness during that time long past. My earliest formative experiences in their midst forged a core structural piece of my identity. My belief in the cohesion of a familial We. There is deep fulfillment in experiencing that particular relational wealth, and it flooded my young being.

My Franco parents, with holiday bonbons playing the role of aphrodisiac here, demonstrated how age-forty friskiness could best the Catholic rhythm method of birth control. Nine months later I entered the household scene. (Franco in this blog means “of Québécois heritage." Reflections on my family of origin are also in many ways reflections on growing up Franco in a mill town in Maine).

I moved into my assignment as the baby of a family of six, ten years behind the clutch of five kids who ranged in age from twenty-ish on down. By the time that I was nine, the fifth sibling had fledged.

It was not until a few years ago that, in the course of research, I landed on a term for my place in the configuration. I learned that the Norwegians have a term attpåklatt for a child born several years after their siblings. A klatt is a dab, dollop, or blob, and various non-authoritative online musings will lead you to conclude that an attpåklatt is more or less an after-blob. I tweaked it slightly to fit me just right, and now there you have it: the extra blob. That’s me.

“Debbie," back then. My kid self thrived on a rich diet of family togetherness throughout the childhood years. Though our home struck me as too sedate after all my siblings had moved out, I could look forward to the next drop-in visit, cookout, or holiday scene to restore the richness of We for a spell. Whenever siblings visited, with their spouses and their littles, there was an air of festival.

Early adolescence arrived — and with it, the lens with which to perceive certain clan-wide behavioral patterns as they were emerging from latency. My present self grasps that these were norms installed in our father’s line…they had hitched a ride through the generations, and conditions had coalesced for them to set up camp in our midst. Which they did.

Here in 2026, I am capable of seeing these things in high resolution. My family is both/and. They are both the warm people in whose midst I became a person, and also the people who can excise me, the extra blob. They are the humans in whose midst I experienced the visceral nature of belonging, and through whom I now experience the true visceral pain of having my belonging revoked.

Exactly one year ago I wrote an essay, a testimonial to the heartache and devastation broached in this blog’s About page. Amid all the tatters of family cutoff, of being the cuttee, an essay bearing both my belief in and yearning for the transformative potential of repair.

The steadfast Deborah of 2025 wrote in conclusion that, though the temptation to give up had found its foothold, there was no yielding to it…yet.

And three months after that particular declaration launched from my keyboard, it found itself to be outdated. With respect to my family of origin, to the hope that this ailing family might commit itself to collective repair, the time arrived. To give up.

*Bridget, my fourth sibling chronologically and the one who has long helmed the sibling ship, led me to part ways with my final illusion. For months I had awaited her response to a letter of mine, the kind of letter you write upon full immersion in your own life review. This letter opened with an earnest apology which I owed my sister, followed by an expression of gratitude for a variety of sisterly moments throughout the decades. Followed by a plea.

I sought Bridget’s family captain authority and participation in helping to overhaul the unhealthful patterns of a failing family system. Including the norm that condones punishing a family member by exclusion from the fold. Via our sister’s daughters, the use of exclusion as a form of control has already found purchase among our next generation.

Back when my daughters and I had already been lost to one another for three years, my husband Noah and I fast-tracked a relocation from the Midwest to Maine. Amidst chronic heartache, we were returning to my one family hub; my New England homecoming after three decades in Noah’s native state. In our first week here post-move, there occurred a messy human interaction between my sister Melanie and me.

In a state of declared weepy exhaustion, I was imparting that Melanie’s eldest daughter, early 30s, had let me down. This interaction — possibly hiccup level, for some other healthfully functioning family — set in motion the unholy sequence whereby Noah and I found ourselves cast out of family get-togethers.

When I pushed back against this punishment which was mine to accept, Melanie doubled down, recruiting our second eldest sister Paula as henchman, if you will. And in keeping with the trope-y-est of dysfunction tropes, the family scapegoated me. The diversion: as long as family members bond over and funnel their attention into how awful I am, for having repudiated family-wide behaviors, the system spares itself a reckoning.

Bridget, yes, has served as one of the three sibling upholders of this family culture. At the time of my letter, via a lifesaving transplant, Bridget had recently crossed a bridge from grave illness into a terrain of restored physical health. I had located hope in the prospect of my sister’s post-traumatic growth, as it is known. The kind of growth that can follow a reckoning with mortality and sometimes looks like re-examination of relationships.

What took place was a selective reading of the letter that I had placed in my sister’s hands. Bridget was willing to read of the apology and the gratitude, but the rest was left unread. I did not have to deduce this myself as she told me outright. At that moment, the extra blob had a thought that was almost hilarious: my sister can leave a letter addressing my family expendability unread…because I am expendable.

In essence Bridget’s terms were that, seeing as I had made an apology to her, she and I could resume our normalcy, which is to say I could re-up with the charade:

I’d pretend that a Perron family coalition banning one of its own is simply functioning as any normal family might.

And I’d pretend to agree that erasure of the hell this punitive family culture has put me through is best for everyone else’s collective comfort.

Bridget might have recognized that — had she looked right into the pain that this punishment-oriented culture has caused — she might not have been able to unsee it. Consequences might have ensued, possibly resembling an internal summons towards making changes.

Possibly beginning with expressing to me, Yes...I bear witness to what this family has put you and Noah through, and I acknowledge my participation.

Best not to look.

I was unable to accept Bridget’s terms. All these years I have wanted to say no only to these behaviors, not to relationship with these humans. Whom I love. Within that sentiment you will find the beating heart of the letter that my sister left in large part unread.

I am acquainted with a familiar maxim from the medical world…An organ transplant is not a character transplant. Via my sister Bridget, as of last autumn that truism bumper-stickered itself to all my findings on my family of origin, and there it remains.

*Family names have been fictionalized.

Next time: the introduction to Noah's and my parental heartbreak