Culture

This week was such a blur I can’t believe that it is already Friday again! This week I have been thinking a lot about family and what I am looking forward to with my own in the future. This week’s insight into my life, I have the sweetest boyfriend in the world that is soon to be a fiancé, and we have been talking a lot this week about our personal couple goals and some goals and practices that we want to implement in our future family. In my class this week we were also talking about family systems and roles, how convenient right? So, I guess you can say I have family on the brain and it has been such a growing experience to be able to apply this to my own life and I just want to share some thoughts about the things I have learned.

Being the middle of three growing up, it would have been easy to be forgotten so I made sure that didn’t happen by being loud and difficult to ignore. Naturally.

This is the role I took all throughout my childhood, up until I left the house- I was the loud, disobedient, rebellious child that took about 80% of my parent’s attention. Realizing that this wasn’t a role I wanted to continue to fill, I learned how to get attention appropriately and fit myself into the role that I wanted to be in, not losing any part of my personality, but instead directing it towards things that were productive and more mature than the things I focused on in high school.

This concept of roles is something that is really important when you look at family dynamics and it’s something that can go unnoticed until perhaps you add someone into the mix or someone leaves. For example, in my house, we all cook together when we are home and it is something that we enjoy doing and brings us together. Let’s say my dad cooks the meat, my mom washes the vegetables, my brother prepares the meat to be cooked, I make the bread, and my sister sets the table and takes everything out. When I left for college, someone had to compensate and fill that role that I left. When I come home and bring my boyfriend with me, there is also compensation required and roles have to be divided to allow him to fit into the family system.

Family systems are important for our social and emotional development as we can see there are so many skills that we can learn just from that simple example I just gave. While they are important, it is also important to realize that our roles from our childhood families or even the culture that is manifest in our childhood families do not have to be the roles or the culture of our future families. This is a trap that is easy to get sucked into, that as everything was is how it needs to be. That is not true. If you aren’t happy with your role or it doesn’t fit who you are any more like my experience that I mentioned earlier, you can change.

Looking back at how I was raised, I am very grateful for many things, but there are also many things that I look back at and wished had happened differently. That is possible through the identification of the issue and action to change it. In my future family, I want to foster an environment of unity and love with our center focused on Jesus Christ. To accomplish this I will look at the thing that I feel reached that goal from my childhood family: we fostered unity through making dinner together, we showed our love by staying in touch even when we weren’t all at home, and we centered our family on Christ by going to church every Sunday as a family. These are things that I want to involve in my future family culture. The most important part of this is identifying and accepting that there are things that were involved in your family culture that took away from these goals. Listing and identifying these will help as well to build a better future culture and with that a better family life for you and your family. I am grateful for change, sometimes it is hard and scary, but often times the best things are.

Picture for the week: Idaho is beautiful featuring the cute boy that I like to hang out with(: This was taken at Swan Valley, Idaho if anyone is ever in town!