Week 2

On the last day of class this week, we mainly talked about Boundaries. We talked about the differences between good boundaries and bad boundaries.

It really helped me to draw a picture of my family and see who's relationships or boundaries are stronger than others. I have always considered myself to be close to all of my sisters, but when i started to think about their relationships with each other it became a lot more difficult because i could perceive it to be different than how it really is.

Another interesting subject that came up during class was whether the youngest child has a different way of being raised than the oldest children did. I definitely think that by the time I came along my parents were really tired, and I got away with a lot more than my older sisters did. However, when they talk about the things that my parents used to do with them when they were little it makes me think that we were raised by different people!

I recently found a book of poems and stories that my dad has written through the years, and many of them were about my oldest sister Tricia and how excited he was to learn he was going to be a dad, and how much fun they had together and all the places that they went together and the stories that he'd tell her. I felt so jipped! I love my parents and i'm very grateful for them and for the way they raised me, but I really do think it's true that with time my parents got tired. So for my oldest sisters they might have had more rules, but they also had more family time.

Family rules are interesting things ..the ones that are explicit in my family are things like "Listen to mom's safe-driving speech every time you leave the house" or "if you refuse to eat what we're eating for dinner than you cannot make anymore dishes with whatever you're going to make." Implicit rules are a little more tricky, because they are things you have to learn by experience. For example, in our family if i am angry about something and I know that i'm going to cry, then I vent to my mom about it. It has never been said, but it seems like the second you start crying during an argument with my dad you suddenly lose all your power. I think it's especially interesting to hear how different everyone else's families are from my own. That might be my favorite part of the class so far.