painting a new family portrait

PAINTING A NEW FAMILY PORTRAIT

How the families we are from help to form the families we become

Where Does One’s current family come from?

•The above question is really what I asked myself when thinking about this project.

•The goals of the project are relatively simple:

1. To examine the extent to which our current family shows remnants of our families of origin

2. To discuss the influence our families of origin have had on our current families

3. To postulate on how these influences may effect our future family and eventually families generations removed from ours.

Our Current family

JosephFamily

Tuttle Family

My Current Family

Right now, what I would describe as my current family exists as really only my wife, Bethany and I. I say this because we do not interact with members of our extended families on a daily basis such that most of our family communication occurs in a dyadic setting between her and I.

My Current Family

Bethany and I are both 30ish, living and working in Portland. With 3 cats, and a couple reptiles; the house is already a little crowded. Soon it will be even moreso…

Our Future Family

Come June of 2012, we are going to welcome a new little nugget to our growing family.

It is our hope that the family he or she is brought up in both reflects and expands on our current family and our respective families of origin.

FAMILIES OF ORIGIN

“refers to the family or families in which a person is raised(11)”.

The Joseph Family

My wife comes from a traditional two parent biological family. Socio-economically they would be considered upper middle class with a nice house in suburbia and a yard. Culturally they are a mix of Irish and Lebanese heritages.

The Tuttle Family

My family is a step family and also a multigenerational family as my grandmother lives with my father and stepmother. Living in an apartment and having no automobile they would be considered lower middle class by economic standards.

Ours is an “old school” Franco-American family, my Mamere (Grandmother)was unable to speak English into well into her teen years

RITUALS

Family rituals include, “a voluntary, recurring patterned communication event whose jointly enacted performance by family members pays homage to what they regard as sacred, thereby producing and reproducing a family’s identity and its web of social relations(114)

Upta Camp and Doubling DownMy wife has told me

many stories of her family’s annual camping trips and the joys of answering mother nature’s call in the midst of the mother nature herself. My family enjoys a

family game night(mostly held during holidays now) where we sit at the kitchen table with a deck of cards and become totally absent from the television or any other electronic devices.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR FAMILIES TO ENGAGE IN RITUALS?

The purpose of engaging in rituals in many fold, they:•Contribute significantly to the establishment and preservation of a family's identity• Serve central ongoing maintenance and relational functions•Help family members make sense of their lives(113,114).

My current family’s rituals

My wife and I have tried our best to adopt some of the rituals of our families of origin to our own lives. Besides simply investing in the relational currency of spending time together it also helps us see each other outside of the context of everyday mundaneness and also harbors the occasional friendly competition.

Humor

“Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.”

-Bill Cosby

Importance of humor in our families of origin

Not too sure this one needs a caption at all!

Humor has been an important part in both of our families of origin. It seems to facilitate creation of communication processes as humor is often an accepted and welcomed change of pace.

We certainly have embraced it…

TYPOLOGIES AND POWER

My family of origin as a protective family

I would tend to classify my family of origin as being classified as a protective one on the Fitzpatrick and Ritchie grid(173).

“Protective families rank low on the use of a conversational approach and high on conformity dimensions(173)”

Power in My Family of Origin My grandmother is

the matriarch of my family of origin. She is the ultimate orchestrator of power(think Emperor Palpatine from star wars).

These orchestrators “delegate unimportant and time-consuming decisions to the partner or older child(My dad), who derives implementation power by carrying out these decisions(184)”

Power in my Current FamilyMy wife and I opt for a more democratic existence, an authority type that is syncratic.

“A syncratic relationship, characterized by much shared authority and joint decision making, implies that each partner has a strong say in all important areas(185)”.

Finally…

My attempt here was to not only paint a picture of a family, but to try and show how such portraits are made. Our current families can best be describe as a hodgepodge of the best and not so best traits of our family’s of origin.

By looking at our origin families; we can better grasp onto how we see our current families and further how we wish our current families to be.

Works cited:

Galvin, Kathleen M., Carma Lee Bylund, and Bernard J. Brommel. Family communication: cohesion and change. 8th ed. Boston: Pearson Allyn and Bacon, 2012. Print.

"Harry Potter and Star Wars." Fabbricanti di Universi - Per scoprire le più grandi creazioni della fantascienza e del fantasy. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2011. <http://www.fabbricantidiuniversi.it/universi/hpswENG.htm>.

"Humor quotes." Find the famous quotes you need, ThinkExist.com Quotations.. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2011. <http://thinkexist.com/quotations/humor/>.