My parents have been divorced since I was a kid and they have their own separate lives and families. It was only me and my older brother until one day when I was 15 we learned that we were going to have a little sister. My Father and his girlfriend ended up having a girl, Alicia, named after my late Grandmother. They lived together for a short while until they ended up having many issues from financial to legal issues, like getting kicked out of their house, and broke up. They were uncertain about who would take Alicia and tried passing off a baby to their friends for short times then to other friends and then family. They did not want to give Alicia to her Grandmother because her and her Mother always fought about everything. But they finally allowed Alicia's grandparents to take her. She was only supposed to stay there for a short time but one thing led to another and now her parents have supervised visits. They have separate times and can only see Alicia on Sundays. Her grandparents, Deborah and John, have taken care of her for 4 years now by giving her everything she needs.
Deborah and John, at first, were surprised by how my Brother and myself cared so much about our sister. They were a couple that were obviously well off and well educated. They have a huge house and have a lot of space for a child to grow up. They would stay to themselves and focus on taking care of Alicia. They had no contact with us until we reached out to them to see our sister. They allowed us to
For the past seventeen years of my life minus a few months, I have lived in the United States. I grew up skiing and bicycling in Grand Rapids, Michigan, until my family decided to move all the way out west to Flagstaff, Arizona. Many eleven-year-olds might become stubborn and defensive in response to such a massive, life-changing move, but I remember embracing it because I was with my family, and I was ready to face any obstacle that unveiled itself to me because I knew that my late comedic father, my worrisome mother, and my troublesome brother would be right by my side. As we made the two-day drive from Michigan to Arizona in our SUV together, we watched the numbers on the odometer crawl up more and more until there were 2,000 more miles on the car than there were when we started, and we
My family has lived here in Oregon since the before the war between the states, and family tells us stories of the good times before all these japs started taking over. Around the turn of the century or so it started to seem like these people were everywhere. It all started with the building of the railroad. The companies brought in those people to build the railroad, and now that the railroad is completed they will not leave. To make matters even worse there is an effort by their leaders to get them to strike for the same pay as us white people that work for the railroad. There has been extremely little or no effort on their part to become like us Americans. I was walking through town the other day and what did I see, there was a huge Buddha statue in front of a new Buddhist temple. They can't even go to church like regular people.
My grandmother’s father, my great-grandpa, left the family when she was six years old. They had since moved to Detroit and
When I was a three week old newborn, Social Services decided that my mother and father were no longer fit to raise my sister and I. My mother was an alcoholic who would soon be in prison, my father was not yet an American citizen, and my parents were in the midst of a divorce. Instead of allowing my sister and I to be split up and sent to separate foster homes, my grandparents brought us into their home for what was intended to be a temporary length of time. This temporary length of
My personal narrative has to do with my journey alongside my family in an event that we all faced. When I was in fourth grade my father got cancer. I am not over protective of the fact that he did, in fact I am quite open on the subject. If they haven’t forgotten, then my friends know, and classmates at the time did know. In this way it is very personal, but also a shared story. As I stated earlier, my father got cancer when I was in fourth grade. This can certainly be considered an unusual childhood. I do not think that many children have had their parents go through cancer when they were around this age. My family spent lots of time in this situation. We were open with this fact, and people had helped us. My fourth grade class
When I first looked for a topic, it was harder than I thought. As I picked up my pen and paper everything evanesced. When the topic searching wasn’t going well, I tried to define the word family. Ooh did I think long and hard, but realized that everybody’s definition was personal and different based on their feelings and memories. I thought long and hard into my family history and adorned the memory of our vacation to South Dakota, along with the activities attached to the trip. In my family narrative, I will be explaining a family trip to Mt. Rushmore, Kalahari, and the wild experience of standing in a glass box staring down from the Willis Tower, trying to unlock my personal definition of the word family. Now, let’s jump to the exhilarating trip to South Dakota!
History is defined as the study of the science of humanity in the past. It's a broad subject that spans over countless people groups throughout the years that the world has been around. Even before the times we have written word history was still being made, and it is still extremely important. We tend to forget that in our average day to day lives we are still making history. That all over the globe everyone is taking part in what might be in a history book someday.
Those two years came and went until one day dad received a phone call from grandma, she needed us. Uncle Tim and she had an argument about his wife and her children, they were living with her until they had their new house built and something blew up. Without a second glance my uncle and his family packed up everything and left. Grandma did not make her own food, she did not shop for her own groceries, she was purely dependent on her son, and she never had any reason not to be, because he was always there for her. Grandma was alone for the first time in a long long time. All it took was for a phone call from grandma to have dad running over there, leading to the realization that dad did not talk to grandma for two years not by his choice but because grandma had not reached out to him
Throughout this semester, I constructed several writing prompts that supported me in creating detailed assignments. Although each one of these writing prompts have assisted me in producing a solid final product, writing prompt six inspired me to elaborate as thoroughly as possible for my ‘Family Tree Project’. Through interviews and online resources, I have been able to discover a substantial amount of information about generations before me. I learned about my older relatives, the significance my family had in their community, and the diversity of my ethnicity. When discussing with my distant cousin Lonnie Melton about my great grandparents, I discovered my great grandmother was a Cherokee Indian. As I constructed writing prompt six, I dove
My parents got a divorce at a young age leaving majority of the custody of me and my two sisters to my mom. Being a single mom, making ends meat is hard enough but my mom went above and beyond. As her career was taking off in corporate america you would think she would seek help taking care of me and my sisters by hiring a nanny or have our grandma watch us on a regular basis but she had none of that. While she took a high position in AT&T payroll being one of the few women in her line of work she
Everything was about to change, we wouldn’t order take-out on Sundays, it was a big deal, I was losing my best friend, the only father figure I have ever had so far. I watched him taking all of his stuff out of the apartment, I was getting more and more mad. Wasn’t our beautiful relationship enough to make him stay? I even blame myself I thought I had done something wrong, maybe wearing his clothes and leaving them all messy, I apologize and swear not to do it again, but it didn’t matter the decision was already made.
What I am today is the reflection of my family's history. History of endeavors, pains, failures and growth. One evening, I was talking to my grandma and she started telling about our family. At first, it seemed quite boring, but ended up in tears and made me learn the most important lesson of my life. It was quite a deep thing to realize for a kid but fortunately and eventually I understood.
As the United States was expanding, so were the prospects for my family. My ancestors arrived in the United States with the hope of bettering themselves and taking advantage of the opportunities that the United States was said to hold. This made my family excited about coming to a new land, one where their future generations, with me included, would be able to progress and prosper. Upon arriving to the United States, my uncle Ben made the journey to the lands in the Far West. They were rumored to hold a great opportunity, and my uncle could not miss out on this chance to gain prosperity (Unruh, 1993). My cousin Michael arrived from Europe as an immigrant to Ellis Island, and was also able to establish his life and those of his family members in New York City (Behdad, 2005). In addition to the two family members mentioned, it was my aunt Carol that joined the Reform Movement of the United States and became a part of a turning point in American political history (Buechler, 1990). With such a rich historical background, I was able to compel together a historical representation of my family's growth and involvement from the beginning with America.
I was born and raised into a hardworking family that are the complete opposite of culture alienators. My siblings and I are all first generation in America on my mom's side and second generation on my dad's side. Life was very hard for my parents to raise all seven of us and depended on my grandparents for most of their help. Being that my grandparents brought all nine of their kids to America from Belize it was also very hard for them so survive and find stability. Most families that come to America from a third world country usually find it very difficult to keep up family traditions and sometimes lose all contact. My family found a way to stay very close and keep the Belizean culture very alive still to this day. As you can tell by now
People don’t realize the sad truth that I’ve been holding on for and secretly suffering with most of my life. People seem to see me as a girl that is naturally bubbly, happy, and outgoing. This was a way for me to hide my real emotions in the time when my depression and anxiety were major factors impacting my self-esteem, just a couple of years ago. So, yes, I admit it -- I was a victim of depression and anxiety. My anxiety has been occurring ever since I was a toddler. My usual anxious behavior would be when I would easily get nervous, wouldn’t talk that well in order to be understood, would go through emotional meltdowns at times, and so forth. My depression however, seem to connect a lot with my anxiety because of my meltdowns and it would easily bring my self-esteem down. One interesting fact about my depression is that it got extreme when I was in middle school. Many events in that time of my life made me feel absolutely worthless inside.