Communication and Family

Family

Julea Pratt

Family has always been a huge part of my life. I am incredibly close to my sibling and parents and I know all of my first cousins like they were my best friends. I thought that my family was this way because the importance of being close was passed down but this is untrue. Love is a relatively new thing in my family, being as it has only been implemented for two generations.

On my mothers side my great grandmother married my great grandpa to get away from her abusive father, she has never really loved my great grandfather but she has stayed with him because she believes in perseverance. Somehow this trait only got passed down to my grandpa and not to any of his siblings because all of them have been divorced one or more times. My great grandfather is the most stubborn man I know, if it isn’t his idea then it isn’t worth the time of day. He is also on a tight schedule, he wakes up at the same time every morning he does his chores and lunch better be ready at twelve O’clock sharp, then he does more chores and sits down for dinner at six O’clock sharp. He has never washed a dish in his life and doesn’t plan to break that streak. He believed in lots of disciple when his kids did something wrong but he didn’t keep track of his kids at all, my grandpa would be gone for days and he wouldn’t even notice. My great grandparents constantly fought while my grandpa was growing up and he decided when he was young that he would never have a relationship that was always tense, he wanted someone he didn’t have to fight with ever.

My mom’s mother’s parents were a very interesting couple. My great grandpa Wood was very religious and he was very judgmental. He was mentally and sometimes physically abusive. My grandma doesn’t remember a lot of her childhood because she blocked it out at a young age. My great grandpa was sick for a very long time but he refused to die his life just drug on and on. His funeral was more like a family reunion because we got to see family that we hadn’t seen in years because he drove them away. Its terrible to say but the only person to cry at the funeral was my great grandma, she truly loved him even though he could be so terrible at times. She was always very submissive and didn’t have much say in discipline, she also thought women were to keep their feelings inside and not let them out for all to see. My grandmother didn’t want to have a marriage like her parents much like my grandpa didn’t want one like his parents, this is how they figured out how to be married and raise a family. They lived off of the “what not to do’s” and created a family that loved each other and a marriage that they could be proud of.

On my fathers side of the family I never got to know my great grandparents. I know that my grandpas parents were wonderful but my grandmas were pretty crazy. My grandparents met in high school and fell in love pretty quick. They got married and had seven children. They found a church early on in their marriage that promoted a strong family base and they jumped into it with open arms. Every child in their family was born within two years of the last so they grew up very close in age. My uncle Jayson was the oldest of the seven siblings but he passed on the role of sibling leader to my dad who was the second oldest. My dad has always been the strength of the siblings, if someone had a problem they would look to him for advice. My aunt Sarah was born mentally disabled and taught our family how to be accepting and humble, she is also the comic relief of the family. My other three aunts took on the role of what my grandpa liked to call “The Brian” there wasn’t anything they couldn’t do when they put their heads together. My grandma has always been our switchboard operator, if you ever needed to know anything about someone in the family she was the one to ask, she knows everything that goes on and she loves to talk about it. My grandfather was a very loving and patient man, he always knew what people needed and he had a great lecture prepared for every situation. He was also incredibly forgiving, his children and grandchildren made many choices he didn’t agree with but he never pushed them away because he knew that someday they would figure out that they needed their family and he wanted them to know that they could always come back.

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