The Strains of Change

 

                This week has been an especially interesting week in class because we talked about real world circumstances and situations. I help make this make a bit more sense, last week we talked about roles each member of a family may fulfill. Such as a father taking the role of an older brother to an only son or an older sister taking the role of a best friend to her younger sister. Last week we spent much of our time talking abut the different roles and changes our own families have gone through, and it was an incredible revelatory time for me and understanding my own family. This week we applied it to social and economic problems the world faces today.

                The primary subject of our conversation focused on qualitative studies of families in different situations. The main one we look at and evaluated was a family that immigrated to the U.S. illegally. As I read the article and then talk thought the process in class, I began to realize not only how pertinent the roles we play are but how they can be so disrupted without anyone ever intending too. To help you all understand and perhaps learn some of the things that I learned this week I would like to walk you a situation we read and talked about.

                To start off we took a family who lived in Mexico and hoped and dreamed of a higher education for their kids and learning English here in America. After living in a small town with lots of family near by that was heavily involved with the kids, and a hard-working husband had saved enough money to cross the boarder the family had decided to begin the process. As a family they decided that the husband would go first and establish himself there and send all he money he could back home, so the rest of his family could pay to come over as well. They planned on being apart for roughly 6 months. The father made it here and found employment doing some labor-intensive work that played next to nothing due to his lack of documentation but lived very humbly and sent what he could home. Over the course of the next 6 months the wife picked up a job so they could pay for their basic necessities and live a somewhat normal live without having their father around.

                What began to happen next though almost no one thought about. Roles began to change. Mom became the primary source of income and was almost never home. Kids spent much of their time home alone or at their aunt and uncle’s playing with cousins. Mom began to be seen less as a parent than did the aunt and uncles for the younger kids while older ones began to choose to go to work over school to help try to help fill the shoes of their father. After waiting much longer than the expected six months. The family had changed a lot but they were about to be reunited again.

                After a long and rough journey across the border they met up with their father.  At first things seemed great and wonderful, but the family soon realized they didn’t fit together they way they used too. Both mom and dad had changed a lot and had to find a new dynamic tot heir on relationship, their oldest son was 19 and felt his father had no lace to tell him what to do after being gone so long and the youngest girl had been removed from all her friends and family and had a hard time fitting in being she didn’t speak English, so her mom became her sole friend.

                As you can see, although all worked out in the end. The dynamic of this family had changed drastically and there were some definite growing pains as they went. Although I have used a bit of an extreme example here, I think that we aught to be ore aware of how our circumstances may change the way our family interacts with one another. Most of the time it will never be something as drastic as this but eve the little things in our lives can throw off our family’s homeostasis. I personally have made a greater effort to be conscious of this and do my best to protect our family bonds.