Family Ties...

My family. My Childhood. What Made me, me.

I have a mom, a dad and a sister. I also have 4 other "sisters", my parents four dogs.

My parents have been married for 31 years. They were young when they were married. My mom 20 and my dad 19. I am 29, my sister is 26 and we are not even close to being married, which causes some grief for my mother, who cannot wait to have grandchildren. I have a dog and I tell her she has a "granddog" and should be happy for that for a little while. I thought I was going to be married once.....a story for a different time though. My point is, this is just a different time and place then the mid 70's when my parents were married.

My mother is a dental hygenist. She has worked for the same dentist for 16 years. She knows her patients well and has the personallity to make people feel at ease when they go somewhere as scary as the dentists office. That is the side of my mother I don't really see except for my two appointments a year when I go get my teeth cleaned or have to get a cavity filled. That is when I see her in her groove I guess.

My dad works for a company that makes car paint. He started working there a few months before I was born, so he is at about 30 years at the same company. I don't know what he does there though. Its kind of weird that he has worked somewhere for 30 years and I can't even explain what his job is to people. I don't even know his official job title. I am a daddy's girl.

My sister is 26. She works for a nationally acclaimed hospital in Cleveland, OH and does animal research. We disagree a lot on what she does for a living. We are very different people, and only in the past few years have we really gotten along better.

My family all lives outside of Cleveland. I grew up outside of Cleveland. We lived in the same house for 15 years in a suburb on the shores of Lake Erie. You could see the Lake from our backyard a block to the north. We had a pool growing up...a very cool accessory for any kid. We lived in an upper-middle class area and honestly, though we may have thought differently when we were younger, my parents really did give my sister and I everything we could have needed or wanted...and the pool helped us fit in to that mold that we were "supposed" to fit in.

We moved into that house when I was in kindergarten. One of my first memories of really getting a dose of reality was in kindergarten when my class went to the zoo and I couldn't go because I had a doctor's appointment. I was so distraught...so distraught that I remember it 25 years later. The other thing I remember about kindergarten was learning to read. I had gotten the basics down my watching Sesame Street, but actually learning it was another thing that was a big influence to me...even today I am an avid reader.

Those things that happen, even when so young, have an influence on who we are today.

The other really special people in my family are my mom's two sisters, my aunts and my "Nana"...the one who made me, me.