My Dysfunctional Family

They say there’s no such thing as a perfect family. I completely agree. My family is quite far from perfect, and if it didn’t sound so cliché, I’d simply say they’re just not normal. This certainly applies to our communication styles, as well. Although I have previously covered this topic, before I begin to focus on communication among my family members, it is important for me to briefly recap my family history.

I was adopted when I was six months old by my parents who had been acting as foster parents for several children. My (now) sister, who is one year older than me, was adopted at the same time, marking the end of their ten year foster parenting career. Aside from the foster children, my parents had also raised four boys of their own, who were all either beginning or attending highschool at the time. By the time my adoption was even legal, they had all moved out of the house.

My adopted parents separated when I was three years old and were legally divorced by the time I was five. My mother took custody of my sister, and my father took me. I grew up nearly on my own, as my father worked long hard hours every day. My brothers had all moved away, and my sister would only visit on the weekends and during the summer months. For most of my life, however, my family was basically my father and I.

When my sister began highschool, she convinced our mother to let her live with us, and my mother moved further away. It was about this time when my father became involved with his girlfriend. While, I never really liked the woman, I did enjoy having a woman’s touch around the house. When she finally moved in, she brought her daughter along with her. Although it is not completely relevant, it is important to note that this woman had been divorced as well. Despite the fact that I didn’t like having these ‘intruders’ in my home, I did begin to appreciate the actual feeling of ‘family.’ Up until this point, dinner with my father consisted of a comfortable seat on the couch, in front of the TV, with plates on our laps. When the women moved in, we began sitting at our previously lonely dining room table, adding to that ‘family’ feel.

By the time I had started highschool, my youngest brother, twenty-five at the time, had come back to live with us while he began taking college classes part time, as he worked full time. It was great to have another male role model around, and for the first time in my life, the dinner table was full—every night! This opened us up to a new level of communication. We shared stories of our day, talked politics, and even had belching contests…like a normal family…right?

When evaluating our families, it is very useful to remember some theories that were developed by John Cuber and Peggy Harroff, of Ohio State University, regarding different marriage types. These marriage types include vital, total, passive-congenial, devitalized, and conflict habituated marriages.

Although, my father and his (still) girlfriend are not actually married, Cuber and Harroff’s findings may still apply to their situation. Throughout the duration of their relationship, I have observed them pass through more than one of these relationship types. The first, much like most new relationships, is the vital relationship.

In The More Total View: relationships Among Men and Women of the Upper Middle Class, Cuber and Harroff describe the vital relationship as one with highly involved couples, who have not lost their individual identities. They note that the clue that a relationship is vital derives from the feelings of importance surrounding and that that importance is shared. In the early stages of my father’s new relationship, he was highly involved with her, mostly due to the fact that they were working at the same location at the time. According to Cuber and Harroff, in vital relationships, it is usually apparent that the people are living for something which is exciting and it consumes their interest and effort. This was certainly the case for my father and his girlfriend at the time.

After a few years went by, my fathers’ relationship had developed into a conflict-habituated relationship. In this type of relationship, there is extensive tension and conflict that is usually managed or controlled. Cuber and Harroff found that these types of couples engage in verbal arguments and fights about nearly everything yet are discreet and polite about it, when in the company of others. These couples rarely succeed at concealing it from the children, which is probably why it was so obvious to me. Essentially, as Cuber and Harroff explain, there is awareness by both members of the relationship that incompatibility is pervasive, conflict is ever-potential, and an atmosphere of equilibrated tension permeates their lives together. Aside from some understandable issues such as money, I believe that this stage in their relationship had many causes, but it was primarily the tension between this new ‘family.’ My sister and I were not used to taking orders from some random woman, and were definitely were not alright with her daughter sharing our privileges. While this stage in the life of this relationship was rather short, it seemed quite prevalent to me at the time.

My father and his girlfriend have now moved on to yet, another relationship type in this next stage of the relationship. Unfortunately, it seems they are now involved in a devitalized relationship. Basically, according to Cuber and Harroff, the relationship has lost its ‘zest.’ By now, both my brother and I, as well as the girlfriend’s daughter have been attending full time universities for a few years. The added tension from the children is now gone, and we have all grown to accept each other. In the devitalized relationship, there is typically no serious tension or conflict and there may be aspects of the relationship which are actively satisfying, such as mutual interests in children, property, or family tradition. My father and his girlfriend were once alive with love, and now it seems as if the excitement and passion is gone and duty remains. The duty to habit. Cuber and Harroff point out that these relationships tend to continue despite the ‘numbness’, and conflict does not occur in part because of the inertia of ‘the habit cage.’ Its almost as if my father and his girlfriend are now just together because of their habit of, well, being together. Regardless of how it seem, I know they love each other, I just don’t think that they at in love anymore. Now, getting back to that dinner table.

These days, the packed dinner table is much less frequent, now that we are all at college, but it still happens. This past Thanksgiving, I took a step back and observed the ways in which my family interacts at the dinner table. Unfortunately, little meaningful conversations actually exist. Our discussions are actually more like non-stop joke cracking and a slew of comical put downs. My brother and I make jokes and laugh obnoxiously throughout, while my father and the girls have belching contests. I’m sure you can imagine how repulsive this actually is while you are eating a meal. There is just an overall lack of seriousness at our dinner table, always.

We are not a very interpersonal family, and rarely discuss important topics as a whole, which is ultimately why nobody really even says anything meaningful at dinner. My father is not very emotional at all, and has a lot of difficulty expressing how he feels. Naturally, this has rubbed off on the rest of the family, which is also why nothing important gets mentioned at dinner. Expressions of satisfaction from members of my family come in the form of a smile, or a good chuckle, especially from my father. I can tell when he is dissatisfied when he reacts with no reaction. That also goes for the rest of my immediate family. It seems that, as a method of avoiding the verbal expression of feelings, my family primarily uses nonverbal communication to convey feelings.

So there really isn’t such thing as a perfect family. I feel that that’s is a good thing, since nothing actually is perfect, and if it is, there’s probably something wrong with it. After analyzing the different aspects of how my family interacts with each other, and using Cuber and Harroff’s ideas, I am finally able to appreciate the uniqueness that each member of my family brings to the table.

Moving on...

Guilty by association. To some, the phrase may mean nothing at all. To others, it may imply criminal activity. For me, it meant voluntarily giving up my best friends and turning my whole life around.
Everyone has that friend or group of friends with whom they grew up. Naturally, I was not any different. Growing up, by best friends provided me years of good times. Reminiscing, my memories remind of clips straight out of the film Stand By Me. For those who are unfamiliar, Stand By Me focuses on the lives and adventures of the friendship of four young boys, from tree-houses to troublemaking.
As far back as I can remember, all the way up until my junior year in highschool, I had the best of times with who I thought the best friends I could ever have. We did everything together, building forts, swimming in the river, sleepovers and birthday parties. These were boys with whom I walked to school for ten years straight. We knew each other inside and out.
My circle of friends and I has always been considered the “bad kids,” or the troublemakers of our grade in school. We were popular because we were defiant, and we were defiant because it was fun. We were always the ones clowning around, and the first to be sent to the principal’s office every day. Substitute teachers feared us- we were the ones who played the ‘name switch’ game on them, which sure was a blast. Outside of school however, our antics were becoming a bit more serious and we began shaping our lives to come.
My friends and I would gladly participate in ‘mischief night,’ on every night other than the night before Halloween- because that’s when the police are expecting it, of course! Our means of mischief eventually grew from harmless toilet paper to more risky acts, such as blowing up port-a-johns in the highschool baseball fields. We also too
Our risky behavior was not limited to mischiefing, however. Before we knew it, we were stealing seemingly harmless cigarettes from our parents and ‘experimenting.’ Subsequently, we became smokers. The experimentation didn’t stop there, at the same time, we were drinking alcohol whenever we could get our hands on it. By the time we made it to highschool, we were experimenting with drugs. The only peer pressure that existed seemed to be only between the four of us, we did whatever the other did, no questions asked.
Little by little, all of this risky behavior started to catch up with us. Our minor acts of mischief were becoming more criminal, and soon, we were getting caught by the police every other time…and charged. It got to a point where we couldn’t walk down the street together without being monitored by the local police. They would literally creep down the road as we walked and watched our every move. Our daily prank phone calls eventually led to serious harassment charges, and our mischievous acts led to a slew of criminal charges.
One by one, each of began to feel the wrath of our actions and our lifestyles. By freshman year, we were all on juvenile probation. By sophomore year, two of them were in and out of drug rehab. By junior year, one of them dropped out of highschool, while the others were failing miserably. My antics in school were getting me suspended every other day while the closest of my friends had begun doing cocaine, and eventually started stealing money from my family and I in order to nurse his habit. While there were many other things that led up to my breakout, this was the last straw.
I always felt I was the strongest of the group, and in retrospect, I was right. I was the only one who didn’t actually have to do what they were doing, regardless, I did anyway. At some point during my junior year I took a step back and looked at our lives. We were all bringing each other down. I realized, if anything, my association with these boys was masking my true potential, and that they weren’t going anywhere in life but down- and I did not want to be a part of it anymore.
It was time for me to clean house. I needed to get out of the ‘bad crowd,’ and establish a better reputation, both in school and my town. I realized that the only way I was going to grow was if I completely disassociated myself from my friends. Not surprisingly, this was an extremely difficult task. It’s really hard to give up your friends voluntarily, on your own terms. At the time, I was resented by them. Now, as I’ve made it to my senior year in college, they finally understand why I had to do it.
So I did it. I stopped spending time with them, took classes without them, and ultimately gave up all of my friends. I started to focus on the good things I could do with myself and my time. In school, I became the first student to schedule an entire period for the purpose of assisting severely mentally and physically handicapped in my schools special services classroom. While it was not actually my intent, this helped people to associate me with good things rather than that ‘bad kid.’ I put more time into my schoolwork, took up extracurricular activities, and picked up a girlfriend whom encouraged my positive personal growth. It became much easier to forget about my old friends when I began dating her, because I was able see what a true friend really is.
Being guilty by association nearly ruined me. Looking at my old friends today, it is easy for me to see how my decision to leave them behind was necessary for me to be where I am today. I was the only one of them to go to college. Heck, I am the only one who left town. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that those guys will be ‘townies’ for life. My association and negative reputation was difficult to redeem, but not impossible. After all is said and done, I have become a success story for the administrators at my highschool- the same administrators who insisted I should just drop out of school because I was going nowhere. In any case, cleaning house and moving on from any sort of a relationship is a terribly difficult thing to do, but sometimes we find it necessary. In my case it was necessary in order for me to erase the negative associations and become an asset to society.

Emotions? What emotions?

For as long as I can remember, I knew I was adopted. It was never kept a secret from me at any point, which I feel was best thing for my parents to do. Naturally, there has always been a part of me that yearns to know my biological parents. I never thought I actually would…
My story is interesting, yet, unclear. At the time of my adoption, my adoptive father was only given a vague description of my background, and that’s all I know to this day. According to the story, my birth father is an American man living in Texas somewhere, and my birth mother is an Indian woman (from India) who was deported shortly after my birth. Funny thing is, I was born in Chicago, Illinois, and adopted in New Jersey. For whatever reason, only the name of my birth mother, Troupe George is listed on my original birth certificate. Because of this, I had always thought that it would be more likely to find her, if any of my birth parents.
My adoptive father has always been very supportive of my desire to find my birth parents. I could never even imagine what I would do if I did happen to meet them. I really never wanted to have any sort of ongoing relationship with them, because that would just be weird. I feel that what I want most out of this endeavor is to see my face in theirs. It would be so satisfying for me to see the very two faces that created mine. I could finally pinpoint the cause of my stubby fingers. I would actually have the opportunity to hear the real story.
Basically, I went all of my life thinking that the only way this would really happen is if they come to me, or I went on the Montel show, and had him do the work for me. Both of those scenarios, I realized were, most likely, not ever going to happen. So, around the time of May of last year, I took the first steps.
I did some research and was able get in touch with a woman named Debra, at the Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS), here in Trenton. This is the headquarters of the adoption agency that handled my adoption. Debra provided me with all the information I needed to begin this process. The first step was to get my name on the national adoption registry, which is list of birth parents looking for their children and vice-versa. As soon as both parties are on the list, DYFS can then contact each party and provide them with the information of the other.
Prior to being added to the adoption registry, the only information Debra was authorized to give me was that my birth mother had been on the registry since 1990. This was absolutely shocking to me, so I quickly completed the application and got myself on that registry. About a month went by and I received an e-mail from Debra containing the address of my birth mother in Rajkot, India.
While Debra was very excited for me to contact my mother, I suddenly became unsure of the situation. Sure, I had waited twenty-one years for this information, but I was afraid to pursue it on my own. Debra offered to attempt to contact her for me, and without any hesitation, I consented. She went ahead and sent a letter to India with my current contact information. Months went by with no response or any indication of receipt. Eventually I put it to the back of my mind while I began to prepare for the fall semester.
It was about the last day in August when I woke up to find several missed calls from an especially strange phone number. Oddly, the phone calls occurred in the early hours of the morning, between 1:30 am to 4:30 am. Surprisingly, they left a voicemail.
I never thought, in my wildest dreams that I would ever be so frightened as a result of listening to a voicemail. “Hello, this is Ms. George calling from India… please call at…” For the first time in my life, I was legitimately scared. This event certainly stopped me in my tracks and filled me with more emotion than I had ever felt before.
I’m not a very emotional person, and when I am, I just suppress it, or, if anything, I’ll use anger to express emotion. But, this time, it was a different kind of emotion. For some reason, this time, I couldn’t suppress it, nor could I get angry about it. Instead, I was filled with an unexplainable fear. I’m never afraid of anything, which causes an abundant amount of problems in my life, yet, this event was so powerful it scared me.
For a few days, I walked around in a daze of uncertainty. It was so simple for my family and friends to tell me to just call her back. Maybe I was just not as ready as I thought I was for this awkward situation. Mostly, I think the problem is that I never imagined meeting her on the phone. I always thought that I would just meet them in person, or even exchange letters and pictures through the mail which would then lead to the phone call. I still have not called her back.
This event in my life has showed me that, sometimes, what you think will make you happy, might just take you by surprise and scare the hell out of you. This was something that I felt I was emotionally ready for all my life, since, in my opinion, I lack an average amount of emotion. This led me to believe that when the time came, it would be easy for me to deal with. I was surely proved wrong when I was overwhelmed with an array of emotions that I had never felt before, most of which I was unprepared to handle.
So, I never actually met my birth parents, yet, but I am now closer than I ever had been before. The ball is in my court, and its time for me to make the next move. I have finally come to terms with the situation, as well as my emotions and decided that, instead of calling her back, I’m going to write her a letter.

Success of Pie...Chart

The Success of Pie

The first thing that came to my mind when I thought of success was how I couldn’t help but to think of pie; the countless ingredients, the savory, wedge-shaped slices, the overwhelming sense of accomplishment that accompanies personal completion of the pie…

Perhaps, I was just hungry at the time, or, maybe not. Who really knows? The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t tell the two apart. After several hours of contemplation I was finally able to establish a meaningful link between success and pie. Then it clicked. From that point on, I knew that I would never look at pie the same again. I know that there is a great deal that must be accomplished before I can deem myself, or anyone, a true success. True success, to me, is the unique combination of all one would consider while discussing this topic: money, happiness, career choice, family and friends.

I have developed a personal success strategy, or, hypothetically, a recipe for “success pie.” Separately, success and pie, is, well, just, success and pie, but together they can be used to formulate a strategy for success. Creating my own Success pie, as I consider it, requires that I accomplish a number of specific goals, before I can think of myself as a total success. I believe that, within one’s lifetime, it’s possible to obtain several different types of success, such as financial success or career success. I think of these individual successes as entirely independent slices of the ‘success pie,’ which, eventually, if all goes well, will become a whole pie. This is when I will have achieved, what I consider, total success.

Of course, money is one of the more dense slices of my success-filled pie. I don’t think that excessive wealth is necessary to consider myself a financial success; however, it is important for me to be financially comfortable. If I were able to retire completely debt-free, after having put my children through college, with at least thirty years of spending cash, I would consider myself a financial success. For the record, though, I never said I would be opposed to being a millionaire, so long as it would not interfere with my personal endeavor of completing the pie to total success.

To some, career choice seems to be the determining factor when considering success. I can even admit that, at one time or another, I have considered an individual may be a successful person, based solely on his profession. For example, for one to assume that a Wall Street stockbroker is ‘successful’ because, after all, he is a Wall Street stockbroker (that spiffy suit sure is a nice touch, too!). Regardless of the fact, to me, career success is still only one piece of the pie, the success pie, that is. Career success is currently number one in terms of importance in my recipe for success pie. While, it is very important to me that I choose a career that pays well and is challenging, yet stable and secure, it is substantially more important to me that I am genuinely happy doing what I am doing. Ideally, in my terms, I will feel that I have reached career success when I can truthfully say that I look forward to going to and coming home from work everyday.

Family and friends, I’ve concluded, are definitely a vital piece of my success pie, which we’ll call, for lack of a better combination term, social success. I just may even go as far as to say that social success could, perhaps, be thought of as the ‘crust,’ or foundation of my success pie, because of its substantiality. One problem exists, however: ‘success crust’ is not an ingredient in my recipe for success pie, so we’ll stick to imagining the social success slice as another crucial piece of the success pie. I would like to argue that one cannot truly be happy without some network of family and friends, whether large or small. In this context ‘family’ may include any member of one’s family from a grandfather to a sibling or even one’s own spouse or child.

In my case, before I can officially toss the social success slice into the old pie pan, I will need to pay my dues to nature and procreate, in order to fulfill my natural responsibility as a living being. As a man, I believe that the ability to win the love of a woman and, subsequently, produce offspring are essential to fulfilling your natural responsibilities and, ultimately, success as a man. I mean, how could one actually consider ‘successful’ without having fulfilled the responsibilities that was intended by nature? I, for one, am impatiently looking forward to the day when I am complete as a man, and can begin to mold my own creation and contribution to society. I will then have achieved what I have been calling, social success. At this point, total success, as I define it, will be merely an arms reach away.

The final slice needed to complete my hypothetical ‘success pie’ will take no more effort on my part than the steps I had already completed. If my hypothesis regarding total success is theoretically accurate, I will, at that point, have fulfilled the requirements of happiness success, the final slice of the success pie.

To make a long story short, far after the fact, my standards and expectations of a successful person are unusually, and perhaps even, unnecessarily high. I doubt that I will never be able to lower my standards of success for others as it may, consequently, result in the lowering of my own personal standards of success. While I have explained that it’s possible to achieve different types of success- financial, career, social, happiness- I, personally, will consider an individual a total success only if they have achieved success in the aforementioned areas. Paul Mourry, a specialized robotics engineer and long-time family friend was the first man that I had known to have achieved this level of total success as I have defined it.

Mr. Mourry was able to retire at age 46 with all three of his kids still in college while he was able to take a vacation every week. The man never ceased to amaze me, and, as a result, set the standard for my vision of a successful individual. During a very recent conversation with Mr. Mourry, I could not help but to ask him for some advice on beginning a path to success. Mr. Mourry stressed, in his words, “The key to success is strategy.” He explained that he developed his success strategy while attending his final year of college, “I just needed to have a plan… everybody needs to have a plan. I called mine my ‘stepstool to success,’” He explained. Within just a few hours of talking to Mr. Mourry I had developed my own strategy to success. That is how the success pie came about.

Whether minor or not, one must be at least be aware of the intangible costs that can be expected. Developing and deploying a strategy for success will undoubtedly cost the average individual a great deal of time, effort, motivation and, in many cases, disappointment. However, these costs may seem rather insignificant once compared to some of the potential rewards associated with success. One of the best examples of such a priceless reward, such as the acquisition of happiness, can be, for some, the sole reason they had begun their journey to success in the first place.

There are many people who tend to argue in favor of contagious success, that is, success that can be passed on from person to person as if it was some sort of new strain of influenza. Under my personal criteria for success this could not be possible. However, it may be possible that it’s simply the actual desire to be successful that is actually contagious. Regardless, what I consider to be a successful individual is primarily the result of a well formulated and effectively implemented success strategy. For some people this can take many years to develop and perfect, so I feel that it is highly unlikely that true success can just be ‘passed on’ like some sort of ringworm outbreak.

Back to the pie. At first, I found it very difficult to find a meaningful relationship between success and pie, however, once one finally came to me, they wouldn’t stop coming. Pie just seemed to act as the perfect structure from which to build any type of effective strategy. Never underestimate the power of pie.

Who I am

Who am I? Well, I’m Kalvin with a ‘K,’ well at least that’s what I thought before stating this assignment. I will avoid the cliché and say that I have thought about it before… but just never told anyone.

If I had to describe the way I saw myself in five words, I would choose ambitious, motivated, independent, responsible, and expressive. There have been many people and experiences in my life that have made me who I am today. I was going to attempt to leave out my life story, but now I feel it’s necessary to fully explain who I am today. I will try to be as brief as possible.

To sum it up, I was adopted at six months, my parents divorced when I was two, and my (also adopted) sister was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. In all seriousness, I would never go back and change any of that, if given the chance. Those are essentially the ‘experiences’ that have made me who I am today.

When adopted, my parents already had four boys of their own, all of whom were in high school already. As a result, I grew up without them. It was basically my sister and I, who lived with my father. My sister is one year older than me and has a mild mental disability. Her only disability is some stunted learning capacity. I guess the easiest way to describe it is to say she has a mind of an eleven-year old—and she always will. She had lived with her mother until he was eight years old, while I lived with my father. This increased my responsibilities.

My father is a hard-working, self-employed painter. All of my life he was at work. I was watching myself, and my sister, home alone, when I was seven years old. Because my father was never home, I took on the roles of the mother that wasn’t there as well as completed the tasks that he just never had time for. I respect him very much because he is such a hard worker—he is 57 years old and running strong! I believe that the combination of these thing resulted in my independence and motivation.

When I started high school, one of my brothers came back to live with us, when he decided to start a college career. At the time I hardly knew him (literally), but now, he’s just like a brother to me, and had played a huge role in my development. My ambition is his fault. He was 25 before he decided to go to college, and that caused me to want to work hard enough to actually have a career by the time I am 25.

Those three people, my father, adopted sister, and brother, are key in defining who I actually am today. The weird thing about my family they are not expressive at all. I believe that’s why I am so expressive and animated. None of them have ever told me how they feel about me…ever. The way they express it to me is when they talk about me. I hear the way my family talks about me to other people, and that is all that I need. I know if they were asked to describe me with five words, they would be very similar to my selection.

As far as my goals are concerned, I just want to make it to a successful, stable, life, like most people. I am driven to work as hard as possible until I don’t even have to work anymore—one thing my father never got to do.

Hello

Wow, its 2:51 in the morning and i'm doing homework. I guess you could i'm burning the midnight oil. LOL! I'll be honest with you, I never use LOL and I really dislike abbreviated speech, so I promise you, I'll never do it again.