Everyone has a different experience with their family. Sometimes it’s a positive experience that leaves you with good memories, sometimes it's a bad experience that leaves you with irreversible scars, or maybe it's a mix of both. Assia shared with me the experience she had with her family, and how it was like growing up in her family dynamic. She told me “ it was complicated because I would play with the middle child a lot but since there was such a big age gap between us and the younger sibling, she would get excluded a lot.” But nonetheless she still stated that she enjoyed having siblings because when she would get in fights with her parents, her siblings were always by her side. Like most families, being the oldest came with responsibility. She would have to take care of her sisters when she was at school, and she would have to entertain them. She shared a story with me, about a time when she tried to find a way to entertain her younger sibling, that had a disastrous ending: “When the youngest was little she asked me to build a tent, and so I decided to attach the sides of the tent to the curtain rod, but the curtain rod was high up so I had to stand on a chair. And keep in mind we were alone in the house with our grandma. When I jumped off the chair, my skirt got stuck on the chair and I and fell, resulting in me cutting my chin open.” At first, she was angry with her sister because she wouldn’t have gotten hurt if her sister hadn’t asked her to build a tent, but in a short amount of time, she came to realize that it wasn't her sister’s fault, because she didn't mean for Assia to get hurt, she was simply asking her older sister for help.
Families are so different today than what they used to be and so when I questioned Assia on whether her parents got angry a lot and if there were strict rules in her household, she responded with this. “Yes, at times my parents could be strict, and my dad had a tendency to get angry. But we have to remember to not compare parents from my time versus today's parents because there were different rules, so even though my dad got mad a lot he was a good father.” In conclusion, family and relationships within your family, are unlike in many ways, but they are also one of the things that bind us together, and shape us into who we are and who we are going to be.
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