Culture of Self Revised

I grew up in Ridgefield, New Jersey for the most part; a small, wealthy, predominantly white, suburban community where education was valued, being involved in structured extracurricular activities and getting into the big universities was the main focus in high school, class had much to do with your social status and acceptance, the number of minorities enrolled in my district could be counted on my fingers, family, along with it’s traditional structure and moral values was the accepted, and respect and manners were a given while addressing elders. My family life however, was substantially different from this stereotypical standard associated with suburban life. Although I am white, my family never quite fully fit into the persona of the suburban American family who owned a home, with the white picket fence, two parents happily married including the stay at home mother, and the breadwinner father, where daily family dinners were a ritual, and little financial worry.  Although many of my friends lived the glorified suburban standard of life, I surely did not.

When I was four, my mother and father got divorced; it was a terrible experience.  I remember clinging onto my father’s leg as my mother was pushing and throwing his belongings down the stairs at us. My brother was not even a year old at the time, so he has a very different perspective of our family structure than I do. For JJ, that’s just the way things were/are; we lived with Mommy and we saw Daddy on the weekends, summers, and some holidays. My father tried to keep things between them civil for us; he always had our best intentions in mind. My mother always took good care of us physically, but abused both my brother and I verbally. I got the brunt of it. For as long as I can remember, she has called me every name in the book and kicked me out of the house for the first time when I was four. My dad, who moved in with my grandparents (where we all still live today) got a call from my mom during the school week saying, “Come pick this f*cking b*tch up.” Needless to say, each time it happened he went to get me and drove me all the way back the next morning to go to school.

We lived with my mother because she didn’t want to give up the custodial rights to my father, although she was very eager to get rid of us every weekend. I think it had something to do with finances too; I’m not really too sure about that. I do know however, we never had any money for extras and my mother NEVER paid for anything more than the necessities. The entire financial burden was placed on my father. If we needed medicine, clothes, school supplies, class trip money, entertainment funds for a trip to the Sweet Shop or Dairy Queen with friends, application fees for college, etc., the response we would get was, “Go ask your father.” Now, giving my mother the benefit of the doubt, maybe she simply didn’t make enough each week to include extras, but my dad paid child support so that should have covered all of the extra amenities for my brother and I. Also, we seemed to move frequently from apartment to apartment, although in the same town (except for two years: first and second grades in Bogota) my understanding of stability was very unstable in itself. I found comfort in structured activities, like my Jazz dance class on the weekends as a kid, being in school with my friends: including all of the extra curricular activities, and simply playing with my brother on the weekends seemed to be activities that I enjoyed greatly because they were constant. I also came to find that alone time was something that I enjoyed whether I was cleaning (I loved to clean and organize as a kid, I still do), expressing myself creatively through fine arts, listening to music, or being outside observing nature.

My brother and I spent the weekends with our father and paternal grandparents. My brother and I, because we have gone through all of these life experiences together, were very close. More so than that, I took care of him (changed his diapers starting at age five) and watched after him during the week, so the weekend was my time to relax and be a kid. My dad, being a police officer, works crazy hours and even if he asked my mother to keep us until he got out of work or perhaps keep us for the weekend if my grandparents were away, she would never let us stay with her. Friday came and we were out no matter what! My dad always had to rearrange his life to fit her needs and it was never the other way around. In theory, my dad always got the sh*t end of the stick even when it came to holidays. I think we woke up with him on Christmas once as kids, when we still believed in Santa.” My brother and I would be threatened if we said we wanted to go by dad or even see him saying, “Then why don’t you go live with your father.”  And finally, after she punched me in the face, that being the final straw, I moved in with my father when I was sixteen years old. I didn’t talk to her for one year after that and my brother stayed with her because she manipulated him with guilt trips to make him stay. I should have gone to live with dad sooner. But, since the idea was always expressed as a threat, it never seemed appealing.  Additionally, I was afraid to leave all of my friends, my school; the life away from my house that I enjoyed and especially my brother. My father worked it out that I still went to school with my friends and graduated from Ridgefield Memorial High School.  It was so much better living with Dad, but I missed my brother.

Unfortunately, my mother is sick now, diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and we don’t talk often. She definitely has taught me what type of mother and educator not to be. Her choices, judgment, and rational have proved themselves to be encompassed in selfishness and greed, an embarrassment to both my brother and I. Since I have been sixteen years old, I have lived with my grandparents and my father in an owned home in the suburban community of River Edge, New Jersey. I consider my grandmother to be more of a solid mother figure than my mother has ever been. My grandmother was a foster child and doesn’t know too much about her heritage. She did bring with her protestant faith that she designated as hers but did not practice regularly or put onto us. Heritage and religion weren’t strong definitive qualities in my household. I wasn’t brought up with strict religious implications in either household like many of my friends. I should mention that I never associated with anyone from River Edge because my life was very much still part of Ridgefield. However, I went to CCD, made my holy communion and have a cross hanging in my room because in both communities that was the accepted and our family was so different as it was, that in a sense, we had to conform. But, by no means does Catholicism or Protestant faith really define me as a person. I will not get married in a church although I do believe there is a God because of fear of not to. I believe in the more scientific explanations of how the universe and we were created. My grandmother also raised me with the 1940’s etiquette, manners, and respect she learned growing up including the idea that cursing, as a woman, was absolutely not accepted. However, although I don’t curse at home, I somehow developed a trucker’s mouth around my friends. I believe that my mother had a large influence on that aspect of me because of the way she spoke to me as a child. I uphold respect for my elders and those who work very hard to make our communities a better place to live like educators, policemen, firefighters, and paramedics, make eye contact with a person during conversation, and use manners and politeness in my actions and speech. My grandfather on the other hand is not religious, but is the stereotypical stubborn German. My great-grandfather, my Poppop’s father was an officer in Germany in World War I. He and my great-grandmother immigrated to America in 1922 and had twins, my Poppop and my great-uncle. Both my grandfather and my great-uncle have lost their ability to communicate in German and therefore our main language spoken at home is English.

Although I am of German and Irish heritage (my mother’s mother was German and Irish) and of Catholic and Protestant faith, I consider myself an agnostic American. I was born here and influenced by suburban American culture and its environment. Although one could arguably say that my broken family life and lower economic status weren’t cognizant of my suburban upbringing. However, in spite of my family adopting our own traditions and customs regarding our time together and the activities in which we participate, each has been influenced by suburban culture and accommodated by us through our experiences to fit our needs. My experiences are a huge part of my culture along with the environment I have grown up in. I believe that my experiences truly have shaped my thinking and me as an adult. From middle school through high school, I always felt like an outsider; I was different. Not having the accepted life that everyone around me did was hard socially. I missed out on the social interactions with friends on the weekends and in high school being social is a big part of one’s acceptance and identity. I feel that this lack of acceptance has proven itself to take me longer in finding and accepting myself. I am fortunate to have my brother and my two best friends that have been there through everything: all the way back to kindergarten. I feel that school was very important for me; it was my stability. I was very involved in every aspect of drumming in the music department and the creative outlets like editor-in-chief of the yearbook. There were times that I didn’t leave school until nine o’clock at night because I would much rather be involved with my friends than go home to my mother. My father was very supportive of my active high school life and even when I moved in with him, he didn’t ask me to quit any of my extracurricular activities especially since they looked good on my transcripts and college applications.

Going to college was a big deal in Dad’s home, in my community, and in school; it wasn’t an option. After grammar school, you went to high school and then off to college. My mother does not have a college degree and did not care if my brother and I went to college or not. My father on the other hand, went to an automotive technical school for two years out in Colorado. His brother and sister, my aunt and uncle went to Michigan State University, so when you go to college in my family, you go away. Where to go to college was a big deal coming from such a small town. I wanted to go somewhere that I could start over and be me, not defined as what kind of family I came from and also somewhere that I could meet different types of people coming from all backgrounds and experiences.

Ridgefield Memorial’s population was very small (ninety-eight in our graduating class) and predominantly white; I think we had six black students in the whole school. Our junior high school was located in the same building and as the high school and as I traveled through the grades, I started to see an increase in the Asian ethnicity of the students. They tended to keep to themselves and as I approached eleventh grade, there was a true segregation between the whites in Asians not only in our graduating class but also, within the whole school. Many times they didn’t want to socialize with us or did they try. They spoke Korean amoungst themselves in school even after learning English. What did bring us together was the competition of where we were going to school. I ended up going away to North Carolina, Catawba College and then to New York, Manhattanville College. It turns out that I went the furthest distance as compared to anyone in my graduating class. I found a whole new culture down south and an extremely mixed culture community at Manhattanville.

I feel that my culture: experiences, family life, community, agnostic religion, gender, and exposure to race and ethnicity (although limited) have really shaped who I am today. I feel that I can relate to children of single parent homes and abusive parent(s) maybe not in the extreme context that some of my students will bring to me, but with a better understanding then someone who has not been through it at all. I think I have risen above the negative connotation and social disconnect that divorced/broken families endure in suburban communities. I also understand that my situation was not nearly as bad as it could have been. I had positive reinforcement and support from my father and grandparents that pushed me to want to better myself, to be an independent woman, and have goals towards success. They also fostered creativity providing the reasoning and ability to think outside of the box instilling that there was always more than one answer to whatever the situation may be. I have been fortunate coming from the suburban community that I have to have a caring family, friends, a roof over my head, enough food to eat, and clothes to keep me warm, an adequate education with educators who really cared, choice in the structured extracurricular activities in which I participated in, and the freedom to choose where I attended furthered my education. I hope I can pass onto my students that you can rise above educationally, almost anything and find the positives in any situation as long as you believe in yourself enough to make change. Take J. K. Rowling for example. It is possible to come from nothing and use education and creativity to make something of one’s self.  I have internalized how my mother has treated my brother and I and this has given me a greater understanding of how an individual can be affected by another whether in a positive or negative way.  I hope to be an insightful, creative, inspiring, active, caring, and understanding educator and learn more about the students, their culture and experiences, and their needs in urban areas.