My mother didn't lead a "typical" life. Not that anyone really has a "typical" life, but my mother's was more unusual than most.
My mother and her sister were given up for adoption and placed into separate homes when my mother was three. My mother had a stable life until she was seven when her adoptive mother died. Her adoptive father was a traveling salesman who had little family support to help him with raising a child. My mother went to live with an adoptive aunt in exchange for my mother's services working at one of the businesses she owned.
My mother said little about her childhood while I was growing up, not much more than I just described. I figured out that she said little to help disguise her uneasiness with her younger years. But as a result of her upbringing she was a rather anxious individual. Nervous when my father was out of town on business or not at home, anxious riding in automobiles, and especially anxious about getting lost...and she had a pretty bad sense of direction. My mother tried hard not to allow her childhood scars to infiltrate her adult life or negatively impact mine. Once when I pressed her about how she made parenting decisions when she had no real role model, she replied that she just thought about what her adoptive aunt would have done, and then did the opposite.
At one point when I was a teenager, my mother and I had a disagreement. I can't recall what it was we were fighting over; likely something trivial blown out of proportion by a hormonally- challenged teenager. My mother ended the fight by telling me "Just because I'm your mother doesn't mean that I have to love you." The words stung.
I did not appreciate the weight of those words until a few years ago. On two separate occasions in her youth, my mother had it demonstrated to her that love sometimes is not enough to keep a family together. As a result my mother believed that family and love were two separate things that did not necessarily intersect. That statement was one of the few times my mother showed me the pain that she had experienced in her life and how it had permanently damaged her. When those words were spoken I was too stubborn to perceive it as anything but a hurtful statement and too obtuse to realize that she was telling me that no matter how difficult our relationship was that I should appreciate the fact that she never gave up on trying to make those two items intersect.
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| From November 29, 2011 |
Lisa Hostetler
Section 13
There seems to be a misconception that introverts dislike people, as depicted in this cartoon, but I would have to disagree with this idea. A better way of explaining what it is to be and introvert or extrovert is where their energy is directed and what is stimulating for them. As quoted from 
People across widely different cultures don't always agree on which facial expressions go with which emotions, they often agree enough to provide support for discrete emotions theory. Primary emotions don't tell the whole story of our feelings. Our brains create an enormous array of secondary emotions from a small number of primary emotions. I agree 100 percent with all of this information. I could travel to China, and be able to tell if someone was happy just by a smile. Realizing someone is sad is a little bit harder because you need to know their personality. Cultures also differ in display rules, which are societal guidelines for how and when to express emotions. We often teach boys to be tough, and girls to show their emotions. Americans can be startled when someone from Europe 
