Unraveling My Complex Family Dynamics

To me my family is very different than other families I know. In my nuclear family my father is in the military, and was constantly away when I was young so we were always going back and forth between being a whole family and having to adapt to my father being away. In my extended family my aunt was adopted from a northern Aboriginal community when she was two, as well two months before I was born my grandmother died and my grandpa remarried when I was two, then we found out when I was eleven that my grandpa was adopted. All these little things have put a lot of pressure on our family who tries to act to the outside world that we are the perfect family. My beliefs and values of what a family is has been immensely influenced by these events.

Bronislaw Malinowski in Family Patterens, Is there a Family? New Anthropological Views, talks about how families have to have somewhere they could be together daily (Collier, Rosaldo, & Yanagisako, 2009, p. 30) This stuck with me for days, we always had somewhere that everyday we would gather as a family even when my father was not around and read either to our selves or when we were younger my mother reading aloud. For my family it was books that brought us together. As a child I was taught to value what I have, and how many do not have access to what I did. We would give to charity, make food hampers, and help those in the military community who were going through a rough time. Respect was something hammered into me all my life, that if you respect people then you will go far in

We became good family friends with a women in Yellowknife, so good that I know call her my aunt, she comes to dinners all the time, and I would go to her for anything. When living in Yellowknife I also got a deeper understanding of the Dene culture, in Close Relations An Introduction to the Sociology of Families, it is stated that “Aboriginals viewed kinship, the basis for assigning rights and duties, more flexibly than did European settlers. For example, their kinship rules included adopted children and adults, friends and people engaged in mutual aid”. (McDaniel & Tepperman, 2011, p. 30) I believe that we have as a white society have changed toward this but that in my family this way of thinking has become very