You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a nice Spanish colonial in Spain.
We ate nothing but potatoes and gravy and egg salad sandwich and we drank Dr. Peppers, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Wednesdays we had wienerschnitzel. I slept on a bookshelf in the boudoir. My eleven brothers slept in the salon.
I had to get up every morning at four to feed the groundhog and the lynx. After that, I had to scrub the nursery and hide the diamond.
I walked twenty feet through lightning storms and tornadoes to get to school every morning, wearing only a pair of Bermuda shorts and a skirt. We had to learn traditional medicine and Egyptology, all in the space of four minutes.
Mom worked hard, making excellent oranges by hand and selling them for only sixteen crowns each. She had to remove every orange three times.
Dad worked as an exterminator and earned only seventy-six marks a day. We couldn't afford any Rubik's cubes, so we made do with only a Helmholz resonator.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up monstrous and awkward.