Ah... Family Dynamics

Now to anyone who actually reads my blog... which I found out the other day MAY just consist of atleast three people so I guess one of you might stumble across this.... Hi. You are probally getting sick of my massive amounts of free time (in which I should be doing school work) in which I write blogs. And honestly... I kind of don't care if you read this. God has been working in my life a lot lately. This is college. A huge time of growing and a huge time of change. So I have a lot to write about and work through. You are welcome to join me, and you are even more welcome to start writing your own blog so I can read more blogs to fill up the spare time when I am NOT doing school work like I should. Anyway....!

Family Dynamics. Everyone has them. And they are all different. On one of the rare days when I was doing my school work (which I need to start setting aside atleast and hour a day to work on, that's atleast 12 minutes per class) I found out that you can map family styles by just watching thier interaction. Each family has thier own style and flavor and after about 17 or 18 years, you have pretty much got it down. You know how things work.

The problem is, how your things work is COMPLETELY different than how the girl down the street's family works. Some of you may have expeirienced this when you slept over a friends house. Some families are just REALLY WEIRD. Now here comes the fun part. You turn 18, graduate high school, and move out. (in whatever order you please) Whether you go to college, work, or just bum somewhere, there is a pretty decent chance you WON'T be living on your own or even with family for a fairly decent amount of time.

So what is societies answer to this? Let's put them all in huge apartment buildings. You end up with 3-15 18-25 year old girls sharing an apartment or a few small rooms. Not only did you just stick the most unstable people group together in one place but you throw in PMSing and relationship issues and WOW... things get crazy.

But I think that the hardest thing to deal with is... family dynamics. We have a lot of things that make us who we are. What we consider to be rude, what we consider to be mean, what is appropriate, etc. etc. etc. And this is all stuff we learned from our family. For example, in my family it is very common for us all (my 13 year old brother included) to sit and watch That 70s Show. In some families anything more than "Little House on the Prairie" would be considered inappropriate. And then there are the families who have been watching rated R movies since thier kids were five. Throw these kids together with one TV and it is a catastrophie wating to occur. This occurs with interpersonal things too.

In my house you knew that if you said something particularly mean, even in jest... you'd get slapped and no one would think it was very funny. However an occasional swear word (while looked down upon) meant nothing. However I have an apartment mate who grew up in a family where the whole point was to annoy to the point of slapping, and it was family entertainment. However swearing...was something not allowed. Can you see the problem waiting to happen? Roomate annoys too much, gets slapped (atleast we both agree on that), and I swear. In both our eyes we have done nothing wrong but in each others we just broke the sacred rule.

So yeah... learning how to deal with that is tough. Still learning. But sometimes God blesses you with a family that doesn't live that far away, even if you only see them once or twice a month, or even if it's once or twice a year. And sometimes God gives you friends who maybe you don't live with, but who let you be you and are ok with it.

Learning, observing, etc.
(Speaking of learning... just learned that etcetera was etc, NOT ect.... that's why my spell check has been saying I was doing it wrong for years...)