Saturday was a long day. For years, my dad’s family has been meeting at the Kentucky State Fair on the second Saturday in August—the first weekend of the fair. Typically it’s my grandparents, my dad and his girlfriend Jody, my aunt Alicia, and her daughters (my cousins), Kealey and Ginny. Since the twins were born, my mom and them have started coming too. Then a few years ago, some of my mom’s family started joining us as well. The numbers keep increasing. On Saturday, from my dad’s side: Dad, Jody, Granny, Poppy, Alicia, Kealey, Ginny; and from my mom’s side: Mom, my aunt Kris, my cousins Emily, Sarah, and Jon, their dad and Kris’s ex-husband Alpha, and my grandfather. To an outsider, the two sets of divorced parents might seem like the major source of drama and stress, but honestly they’re all pretty civil with each other.

The stress comes from a different source entirely. And actually, it’s definitely possible that I’m the only one who feels it. Maybe it’s my overblown sense of self-importance, but at the fair I feel like the glue that holds the whole crazy mess together. Granted, the two sides of my family fare just fine without me there, but there are decidedly two halves to the group and I’m right in the middle. What’s more, it’s not just the awkward group dynamics that prevent us all from traveling in a giant horde, the sheer number of people at the fair—92% of whom are rednecks—make it tactically impossible for all 15 of us to move together from one place to another. So inevitably, the troops split off into smaller squadron units. This presents obvious problems for me, and it happens every year. When it was just my dad’s family, I always felt guilty about how much time I spent with each family member, and now it’s even worse. You’d think having been a child of divorce for over 20 years now, that I’d’ve well reconciled the issues of dividing my time between family members, but it’s never been easy and hasn’t gotten any easier. And now that there’s two sides rather than just a lot of relatives, I feel like I’m some sort of traitor with no real allegiance to either team.

So I spent the vast majority of my time at the fair on my cell phone, trying to locate a group of family members that I wasn’t with, and then walking across the expo center to try to find them. In all the 7 hours that I was there, I saw the cake exhibit, and rode one roller coaster. No animals. No games. No vegetables, crafts, shows, not even one blessed funnel cake. I was pissed. Fuck, I’m still pissed. And try as I might to please everyone (I know, I know), inevitably there’s always a few who feel slighted. I left the fair earlier than everyone else, without calling and locating every single splinter group, and this undoubtedly ruffled a few feathers. I’m pretty sure my dad is mad at me for not tracking him down before I left, despite the fact that he was two sheets to the wind by 11:30 and had his cell phone turned off the entire day.

In short form, the fair was a bust. Luckily by 6pm, the day had only half begun and I was soon on my way to Cincinnati to see Theo…

…to be continued.