My Family : My Favorite Day

Your life is changed every day and there are many points to your life. One point of my life is that family is the most important thing. Family is an important factor of everyone’s life, it’s who you are and who you have become today.

Imagine a day where one wakes up early, watches a parade, and then enjoys a plentiful spread of food with loved ones. These activities describe Thanksgiving Day in my family. Along with countless other people from the United States, our Thanksgiving holiday focuses on family and food. Yet, the homemade stuffing side dish, which sits beside a turkey and cranberry sauce, is much more than bread to my family. Five generations of women have used a special recipe that now connects us to a special person that is no longer with us.

On the weekends, or during winter and summer break, I would frequently visit either my grandmother or my father. My grandmother is whom I consider to be my second mother. She is the sweetest lady, her hair was burgundy, cut into a flowy bob, and she had a million moles. Every time I went to visit, she would pamper me and treat me like a princess. Sometimes my father would pick me up from her house. He lived in a big and brown mansion in Long Beach. Every time I went to visit him I had a lot of fun; not only because we barely spent time together, but because my step brother and I would go on “adventures” around the house. Since my father lived with several people, from who-knows-where, my step-brother and I would team up with the other children who lived with us and go ghost-hunting. We were all abundantly creative so our adolescence felt more like an extensive action movie. Excluding all the adventurous activities with my family-friends, I often spent a lot of time making new friends in grade school.

An exciting trip with family is something that most families remember vividly. In this case, it was not the most exciting trip we have taken, but definitely one to remember. Being in the hospital had some interesting experiences I saw and felt.

I woke up and it was a new day, where everything was normal, but it wasn't, my brother wasn't there. Over the years I grew up with my brothers and two dogs which one looked like a fatten up sausage ready to be eaten. I learned to love and live with them. They were my best friends and I spent most of my days with them. Playing history games or other similar games which they were a massive part of my life. One day that all stopped when the wind died down all was left was me and my final brother. (2)

A change in characters happened throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Nath, Lydia’s brother, was doing everything in his power to keep Lydia from being happy. He believed that Lydia was receiving favoritism from their parents, so he got jealous and tried to change this. For example, he knew his younger sister did not know how to swim. However, he pushed his sister into the lake to make her learn how to and to see her struggle because of his harsh feelings towards her. This caused Lydia to almost drown, foreshadowing what caused her death. Then, when he learns of Lydia’s death by drowning, he is extremely affected. He finally becomes concerned, however, at this point, it was too late. He wanted to get to the bottom of her death. There was an investigation to see if she had committed suicide or if she was kidnapped and murdered. To figure this out, at Lydia’s funeral, he found a boy that he thought was taking advantage of Lydia. Nath knew the day before Lydia went missing that she was with her friend Jake. He did not trust him. Nath knew that when the two of them hung out, all they did was smoke. However, he also knew that Jake frequently looked to have sexual relationships with other girls, so he thought that he also tried this with his younger sister. Nath approached him at the funeral and suddenly started questioning him and then punched him. Nath’s actions and feelings about his sister changed because of her death.

Have you ever put your trust, and love in someone’s hands and they betrayed you? Well, I did at just three years old I met my mom's boyfriend, who I would call dad at five years old. Through the first three years of my life, it had always been my mother and me against the whole world. But at three years old a man came into our lives who would change our entire lives whether for the good or for the bad. This man feigned to be a great father to my family, although he was the love of my mother’s life. He was and is still the only Dad I know, the man who showed me how cruel, and heartless someone could be. Through the first years of my life up until I was nine years old I was the happiest and joyful girl in the entire world, filled with the love of a mother and a father. But soon that would change after the man I gave all my trust and love, who promised to protect me from all evil betrayed me by sexually assaulting me at just nine years old. At just nine years old my voice was taken away from me and I became trapped within myself because I did not want to lose the love of my mother. I kept this ongoing assault to myself up until I was fourteen years old. And my whole life changed because not only did I expose a truth that I knew the rest of my family sided with my step-father the “Dad” I knew, the Dad that was supposed to love and care for my mother and me. He was a monster to my mother and me, but an angel to the rest of society. According to my family a responsible, strong,

“ HELP!HELP!SOMEBODY LIFT THE COUCH!”,my mom screeched for the umpteenth time today. “Why do I even bother trying to relax?”, I ask myself as I dragged my feet into the living room to see what all the commotion was about. As I turned the corner I immediately burst into laughter. My whole family looks at me like I’m crazy. Then I started getting aches in my chest. This moment reminded me of something that happened almost everyday in this house.

Three years ago, I was going through stacks of pictures I had scattered around in my nightstand and by chance, I came across a picture of my sister, my grandma, my mom and I at an ice cream place in Germany, it sparked a fire inside of me and memories of my grandfather and I flooded my mind. My Grandpa was a great man. From his bold monopoly man moustache to the pearls that radiated under it, he always managed to liven every room he was in, even though he was hard working. He prided himself because he owned a taxi service and a delivery service which are really popular. They lived in Frankfurt, Germany in a palatial home, with a spiral staircase and an awesome junk room where my sister and I would play in for hours. It was the best, they had the most savoury delectables but it would never amount to the Volksfest. Volksfest was my favorite part about visiting because going to get ice cream with my grandpa and the rest of my family was what made life worth living and being appreciated. We usually visited a couple of times whenever we had the chance.

Our lives were a routine, dad got up very early to go to work while my mother stayed home, homeschooling me and making sure she had dinner ready for when my dad arrived. Supper was the most important part of our day, it was the only time we had to be together has a family. The food was delicious, must of the time was chicken soup. Every night during our meal we talk about our day except dad, he did not like to talk about his day, he preferred that we talked about ours. At the end of our supper my father could give my mom the money he had made during the day. My favorite part of the day was to go to sleep, I remember how my parents would take me to bed and tell me the most incredible

As an adoptive child, there has always been a little part of me that felt missing or incomplete. It was not that my family did not feel or act like family, there just seemed to be a deep-down connection or piece of the puzzle that was absent. This absence established a newly found interested in history and genealogy. I wanted to know where my biological ancestors originated and the historical events they experienced. I faced an engrained desire to obtain my biological connections which so many of my friends and family members felt with their relatives. My initial focus when understanding my family was based on biology, which, as we have studied, was not the only relationship deemed meaningful. Now, after doing DNA tests and discovering my ancestral heritage, I am able to appreciate the need to identify both biological connections and kinship connections.

Family is important, including your ancestors. Your family history can say a lot about your current position in society. Society has a way of classifying people into groups based on resources known as stratification. Social stratification as defined by the book “refers to how individuals and groups are layered and ranked in society according to their access to and possession of valued resources” (Ballantine, Roberts, and Korgen 2018). After talking to my dad and mom about my family history I got a better idea as to where my family is on the social class ladder and I was able to see how my ancestors lives shaped my life in some ways that can be understood from a sociological perspective.

While growing up with a sister usually lives in the same home in my case I lived with my mother and my sister lived with her father. I grew up in New York City, and my sister was in Miami two separate locations. The outcome would be, I joined the military and currently attending school for Occupational Therapy Assistant and my sister became a housewife and a Nurse after her separation. How we are raised in two separate locations and one parent a piece can grow up in two different ways. How we turned out is two members of society that paid taxes, both own a home, and live to raise our children.

“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it”

My family is deemed to be what is referenced as a nuclear family. A father, mother, and their offspring biological and adopted living together under one household. My family was of low socioeconomic status and due to this position, we were raised in a low-income neighborhood. However, that did not affect how my mother and father reared their family. I am the third child in a family of five. My role in the family was that of a helper to my mother of household duties and a caretaker of my younger siblings. My parents did a wonderful job of nurturing my siblings and myself by providing a faith -based