“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.” -  Mitch Albom

They're a world my world revolves around My sacred piece of solid ground The flesh and bone that gives me strength to stand They are a fire in my drivin' on The drive behind my comin' home The livin', breathin', reason that I am A family man

It's not really Lu's place to complain. His parents are fair, hard working people, one's who have made a life for themselves in what could easily be called the asshole of London. They're well off and they have a nice house, easily one of the nicest around, totally white picket fence without the fencing.

Every morning Mr. Watts leaves the house, his thermos full of fresh coffee in one hand, a scone and his keys in the other, his cheek still warm from a kiss from his wife; before he'll settle down in his tiny little car, waiting for it to spring to life before puttering down the road to the bank where he's been working for the past thirty years.

Mrs. Watts will stand on the porch, waving him off until his car is just a speck in the distance before she ducks back inside, cleaning up what remains of her extravagant fry up and getting herself ready for her job in the afternoons as a secretary in a law firm. Part of her morning includes jostling a pale kid, placing a kiss on his forehead and telling him what needs to be done that day before heading out.

Every day. Lucien's lucky, there is no shame felt when he lopes out of the front door, his parents don't colour in embarrassment as their six foot son trails after them in public; his entire body scrawled with tattoos and bruises. He's a regular at the skate park, he's a regular trash talker. They beg him to speak sweeter and for their sake, he complies. He's not a bad kid, he just feels suffocated. This city is shit, he knows it and they don't want to teach him to be satisfied even though they so desperately want him to just be happy.

Bromley's the only crime they've committed in Lucien's eyes. His parents have done everything for him, perhaps even more, letting him do what he would, trusting him with his own life and only intervening when they knew that they should. He owes the world to them, they even pushed that he go into the arts when it came up that he was good at it. He was tried by the law and his father was the first one there, posting bail, promising fiercely into his son's ear as he was shaken by the betrayal that the person who had actually done it would be caught, that everything was going to be alright.

Some people are better off when you pretend that they don't think they exist. You can grow up without them, you can go on and not have to deal with the reality of them for such a long time that it's almost like they're not there. Then, one of those days, there's going to be a phone call and everything's going to come back to you and you're going to realize that they actually do exist and they're there and you have to deal with them.

Jacqueline and Matthew Lowes had two kids, both as perfect and beautiful as one could ever desire. First Skye, a pixie in appearance but a firecracker in life, then Oliver; American's golden boy incarnated. Their marriage was happy for about five months, life crashing down as their first born wailed in her crib, seeking out attention desperately, only to be tossed in the arms of an overworked and over tired nanny, who cooed lullabies in the language of love, soothing children who were just as irritable as their parents.

Life was easy, they grew up with everything they wanted, starved for nothing but affection. They were the products of continual brush offs, the children of too little time. Skye turned five, Oliver two; and Jacqueline and Matthew found their lives again all over the world, no longer finding themselves able to be on the same continent anymore.  Mr. Lowes settled in Hong Kong, the hub of what he called 'business' but rather, far away from the prying eye of all those who wondered of his numerous affairs, and Jacqueline found refuge in Venice, the flooded city providing her with a vacation in the midst of her former European circles and under the constant attention of various staff members, or pool boys as she so fondly refers to them.

They wouldn't divorce, it just wasn't done, not with a union this powerful. The children suffered. Christmases became ones of tradition, where the Lowes children became adults, hosting all those lost and hungry for the same affection they lacked for the event. They built their own family and they were happy on the most part, only being ripped raw when the phone would ring or someone would drop by.

There is no family here, there are people united by blood, some who believe they owe the other some sort of duty, some who refuse to acknowledge that they are anything more than a shared last name, a pool of wealth that has twisted and warped them into bitter and lonely people; parents seeking their children when they need something and recoiling for a little while when they are met with anger and spite. 

Once I heard a man say that children are like dogs, that the more you beat them, the more they love you. He didn't mention that one day, that angry, scarred beast is going to turn around and bite back; that they would bite back hard, because for the first time in their life, they've learned that they have nothing to lose.

On the surface, it would appear everything in the Gilroy family is picture perfect. They talk about their son like he's their golden boy, like he does no wrong. Every conversation is them bragging about their son's successes, about where he is and where he's going to be. One would think they couldn't be more proud of Zachary. And yet once the crowd is gone, everything's the opposite. No words are spoken, if they are, it's purely criticism.

Zach has never felt at home anywhere but the rink. His childhood home has always felt more like a prison of tension. Every conversation between him and his father that wasn't about hockey feeling extremely forced. From a very very young age, Zachary has had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He was pushed to exertion daily, beginning intense trainings far too early on. No accomplishment was ever good enough for Mr. Gilroy. Despite excelling in what he did, far surpassing the other kids around him, nothing sufficed.  He'll rarely, if ever, admit it, but he seeks his father's approval, it's all he's ever wanted. 

Arielle grew up in the best borough of New York, an only child but with cousins aplenty to fill the gap. The Vanderbilts had a plenty and they didn't believe in passing their kids over to someone else to raise them than doing it themselves. Of all the Manhattan babies, she's the only one that she knows of that didn't have a nanny, her foreign languages learned not from a caretaker, but from lessons that she went to take.

She learned how to play the cello after hearing the music in a symphony, taken with by her father to experience classical sound for the first time. Arielle's life has been shaped by experiences that her parents have tried to encourage, her love for old film developed after lazy Sunday afternoons curled on a couch with her family, watching Audrey Hepburn and Clark Gable.

Darcy's relationship with her parents, in a word: shitty.  She isn't easy to please; she was petulant, and they should've learned to suck it up.  They should've known better.  Like everything else with them, they didn't learn.  Didn't learn to leave her alone, didn't learn that saying nothing was better than asking.  Her stories about them are mostly lies, parts of plots she's seen taken out of telenovellas and movies she caught five minutes of, always concerning her mom.

Nymphomaniac; he hit her; addict, just like me.  Her forever favorites, the ones she told every Thanksgiving break in boarding school.

Her relationship with her dad isn't totally lies—he's a headshrinker, a therapist, less fucked up than Darcy thinks of him.  He isn't against her, wants her to be his sweet little girl, as if she ever existed.  Also the reason Darcy's been bumped to a few therapists, their words sticking in her head like nothing else.  A danger to yourself, whatever that meant.  She doesn't get, at least not yet, that he's trying to help because it never seems genuine.  And really, truly Darcy's inherent fucked up-ness comes from them.  She swears.