Tag: dailyprompt

Family Tree

Describe the most ambitious DIY project you’ve ever taken on.

My husband’s brother and his ex-girlfriend had a child when they were teenagers. Although our family was understandably confused at what was to be done next, they decided to give our niece up for adoption.

I’ve had a little bit of experience with this because my best guy friend Rory was actually adopted. He was adopted by a family who was able to adopt his older sister as well. Later on they found out that they had more siblings and that the other children were actually separated and put into the system where Rory and Jocelyn were able to stay together. As a child Jocelyn went on a field trip with her school to the zoo, there was a animal that was orphaned because the mother passed away and another animal took over as a surrogate when the person that was in charge of the tour said that this mother adopted this orphaned baby, as if it was her own, a child spoke up asking what did adopted mean. Jocelyn said “adoption means the baby grows in the mommy’s heart not her belly”

My niece was adopted by an amazing family. A husband and wife who could not have children, yet they had so much love to give that they had already adopted a son. They decided that the best course of action for adopting our niece was to make it an open adoption. They had tried before with their sons biological family yet they sent pictures and letters and tried to keep them knowing what was happening with their son but the letters only came back  unopened, I think it just became too much for his biological mom. But with our niece we embraced it. They made sure to keep us in the loop of everything that was going on with her. She did not just become part of their family they became part of our family and over the years my brother-in-law married another woman and my I call her sister-in-law had a child with another person. But the bond between our families never ever was broken. We were able to have at least once a year visits with them. Our niece got to know all the rest of the children being born except for our daughter because by the time our daughter was born she was a grown up and they didn’t necessarily need to keep us updated.

My most  ambitious do it yourself project, I have ever done was a family tree that I made for my niece with pictures and locations telephone numbers address,  everything that I could get my hands on that could tell the story of where she came from.

I wanted her to know that even though she was with a family that could love her and could take care of everything she ever needed or wanted in life she also had a family that maybe at the time was not able to take care of her and give her all those things but we could always give her love and we could always remind her that she came from a family. That her family did not just give her away and give up on her. That her family was always going to be here if she needed them or if she wanted to know anything about herself. I did a family tree of her entire paternal family line. I learned things about my husband’s family that his uncles had not known, that his mother didn’t know that even his grandmother who is still alive on his father’s side didn’t know. I found out about my family.The family I am  married into, the family that was going to forever be mine. Now it’s the legacy of my daughters.

Her mother was completely amazed by this and she embraced the information for what it was, the answers for the questions that adopted children have to search for later on in life. Sometimes they find the answers to their questions and sometimes they realize that they were better off not knowing. This way she doesn’t have to go through all of that as an adult wondering why she was casted aside because she wasn’t she was and will always be part of this family as we are part of their family. We also very close to their older child who didn’t have a family structure like our niece did. But every year for Christmas we received a Christmas card from them, we received a link when their son graduated from college so we could watch him walk across the stage. We got the link to watch our niece walk across the stage for high school and for college. This is something that may not have been in her future had she never been adopted. She is a lovely young lady and allowing her to know her family a whole lot better brought us all a lot closer together as well.

Bro or Brah

If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?

I literally hate when my nieces or my daughter call me bro or brah. I seriously can’t stand to even hear it come out of her mouth. First of all hi identify as a female always have always will but I wonder sometimes if they understand what the difference between their female family members and their male family to call their male family members bro I still kind of feel like it’s a little bit disrespectful. Before brah and bro I would have said I hated the C word and the N word. I still hate those two words however they’re kind of part of our world and some content needs to be preserved in order for us to understand what our ancestors went through and to work on going forward and not making those mistakes again. Other than that I feel like people are here to make content or to make their opinion said and heard and I don’t believe that it is okay to edit or  rewrite someone’s craft

Sometimes you can be a grown woman and still need your daddy

What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?

So recently I have had to come to the realization that my dad is not always going to be here. Years ago I was able to have the conversation I always wanted to have or needed to have with him, regarding the lack of parental attention I got from him as a child even a teenager and going into my adult hood. He said all the things that I needed him to say. He actually told me how ashamed he was and how much he regretted not being able to  actually have a hand in my upbringing. I was able to get some closure. Knowing that he understood how much I needed him. He may not have been a reliable parent but he has always been a good Tata ( grandfather) to my girls.

I think I always felt like no matter what I would significantly miss my mom more if she were to pass away, then I would my dad. I think it was because my mom represents my stability, my strength, liability and most importantly my ability to process problems and make sure that I’m accountable for the things that I’m responsible for. My dad always represented my sense of humor. I tend to laugh when it’s not appropriate to do so. I tried to take things that are supposed to be serious and I try to laugh them all or act like they’re not as important or a big deal. So I just always felt like with my mom was to leave this earth I don’t know how I could live. But I never thought about what would happen if my father passed away.

This week I have been doing with my dad not being able to breathe on his own. He was hospitalized with pneumonia a few weeks ago. And when I say it’s difficult to have pneumonia in Arizona I’m not being funny. The air is so dry out there that it’s a really hard for someone to actually be diagnosed with pneumonia but my father and my stepmother were both actually hospitalized with it at the same time. They were discharged and he was only home for a few days before he started nodding off while in the middle of conversations. The morning he was hospitalized again I actually was having a conversation with him when he fell. All I could hear was commotion in the background and my stepmom letting me know that they were going to call me back. Which he did. He told me everything was okay , that he was okay. I got dressed for work and went about my day. Before I clocked out for work to go home I had a message from my aunt my dad’s younger sister saying that he was hospitalized again. And he was having trouble breathing his oxygen level was really low. They couldn’t find anything else wrong with him.

Do they know what’s wrong with him? Not exactly but they do know that he is unable to breathe without the oxygen machine . They have been discussing giving him a tracheotomy. They say that the diaphragm is damaged and those two things combined mean that he will never sing again. This might not be important to most people but most people are not part of my family and singing is important to us. I know that the quality of his life is what actually matters but something that he was will never be the same. I do hope that he does pull through this.

I can never say that I love one of my parents more than the other. But I don’t remember them ever being a couple. They split up when I was 2 years old, and I can only remember them separately. As a grown up I was part of a lot of children that grew up in my family or were in my life that came from broken homes. A few of them were able to have a relationship with both of their parents. I am blessed to have been able to say that I was able to have a relationship with both sides of my family.

The picture that I included in this post was given to me by my father’s oldest sister my Aunt Mary. She went through a box of pictures that she had and she wanted to distribute them to the people that she felt like would want them or they belong to . She gave me this picture and it was the first time I honestly saw my parents as a happy couple. They are smiling and having a good time. They are me. I am a combination of all the good and bad that makes them who they are.

In the next few months I am going to have to figure out how to get through learning how to get to know my parents differently. They are both my world and even though I am a grown woman with a family of my own I need them both . I have my Mom right now but my dad is almost 1,000 miles away from me and I wish I could just hug him. I need my daddy and I don’t know what the next few months will bring. I am scared and I feel really stressed and alone.

Pasta or ghetto nachos

What’s your go-to comfort food?

I might go to comfort food has always been pasta. I love pasta I can different kinds of pasta with different kinds of sauce and throw that stuff together and I am a happy happy camper. But for some reason I don’t have pasta at my disposal I like to put together what my friend Blair called ghetto nachos. Basically get a nachos are any kind of chips that you like preferably Doritos or tortilla chips and any kind of lunch meat turkey chicken I like chicken I love chicken cut up and small as you can drop it into your chips and get a couple of handfuls of shredded cheese Blair used to use sargento but I’ll take any kind of changes cuz I like cheese too and drop it in the middle and then microwave it for just a few not even a minute I don’t think just let it melt and then when you pull it out get a dollop of sour cream and drop it right on the top of that thing and then go to town there’s you get them not just so good so easy to make and not that expensive. That is my comfort food

How the other half lives.

What are you curious about?

I’m always kind of curious about how other people live. Not only in different parts of the world, but also different regions of this country. My husband was raised in the south, when  say South I’m talking about,  Southern Living. Most of the time when he enunciates his vocabulary it is spelt, exactly the way it sounds. I grew up for the most part in the southwestern part of the United States which is Arizona going into Texas. The way that people from Texas are viewed as being Southern is not the same as people from Florida , Virginia , The  Carolinas, Tennessee the southern Appalachians, the heart of The Mississippi, and please don’t get me started on Louisiana which is a whole separate type of Southern to begin  with. Most of my education growing up was in Texas so we had a huge emphasis on how Texas became part of the United States and how it came from being its own country, as well as the fight that it took for us to become what is today. Six flags Fly over Texas and people don’t really pay attention to what those mean but all six of those flags represent what Texans are about. However to say that every state that’s in the southern half of our country, hold that same view is not correct. Being from Texas or growing up in Texas holds a completely different meaning to any other state in this country. You honestly cannot tell a Texan what their history is because they’ll tell you exactly what you got wrong. So what I’m curious about is people who live in other parts of the United States I am always wondering what makes their region so different and when I talk to people from different places you can honestly tell that they are raised and taught different values different histories of how the place that they call home actually came to become their home. I found out a long time ago that my family came here from different directions my mother’s side of the family came from across the pond UK and Spain and my dad’s family it’s kind of still up in the air but for the most part we know that they were primarily native American when I found out what the history behind my family was I starting wondering what makes my home my home yet so many other regions in this country have a lot of history behind them as well. when I speak to my husband about where he came from and where his family come from I can not even fathom what he was looking at when he was growing up

I grew up with mountains, desert and landscape that has been described in books for ages.  I don’t have memories of oceans as far as I can see being able to watch a sunset over a horizon that is mirroring the actual ocean. If any of y’all reading this are from different places in the United States or even from different places around the world tell me what it’s like where you call home I really am curious

I wouldn’t say waste

How do you waste the most time every day?

I wouldn’t say waste but if I could sleep all day I feel like that’s what I would like to do. If people just let me I would sleep all day all night until the next day until I can sleep no more or until my life was nothing but sleep. Instead it seems like I waste my time worrying about what other people are doing and how to fix everybody else’s life.

Salitos

Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?

Salitos, are actually dried prunes that literally are salted and then salted again. When we were kids we used to get a lemon or an orange and cut it in half and shove the salito inside of it. Then spend hours destroying our teeth by licking the lemon or orange with the salito inside. Sometimes my Mom would cut random fruit slices like pineapple oranges lemons apples even and put the salito in there with it and let it absorb all of the different flavors. I don’t know who came up with the idea of this but every time I go back home to Arizona I find a place that sells them just so I can do this.

Life before social media and the cloud…

Do you remember life before the internet?

Most definitely do I remember life for the internet. When we were kids we didn’t have anything close to the internet. We had maybe our uncles or our cousins or some older person in our lives following us around with a video camera. To the point where we had to look around to make sure that Uncle so and so didn’t have the camera pointed at us. Thing is, we secretly didn’t want people following us around recording every single thing that we did because we used to get into trouble. We used to do things that we didn’t want everybody to know that we were doing. They used to let us go outside and run amok until the street lights came on other than that they were not interested in what we were doing and what was going on with us we rode our bikes all the way to the other side of town we made sure that we had some kind of water or some kind of substance while we were running around. We had these things called diaries and journals that we wrote our secrets inside of things that we did things that we didn’t want anyone else to know and if somebody got a hold of that and read it out loud I was the end of the world. we didn’t want anybody knowing our thoughts and what we’re doing and what we’re thinking and our hopes and our dreams. Now I can’t stop these kids from expressing every single thing that they want you to know about them, they don’t have secrets, they get butt hurt if you don’t read their blog or you don’t like all of their pictures on Instagram. I remember thinking when I first was introduced to the internet that this was going to be the most amazing thing in the world because we could connect with people from the other side of the world everything was right there so close. Now not so much. Now we have to worry about who our kids are talking to and why they’re talking to them. We literally have to worry about who their friends are where they came from how old they are and  are talking about things that we didn’t even know about til we were adults.

Broken Heart Broken Digits Broken cartilage Fractured tail bone.

Have you ever broken a bone?

Sort of….. So I have broken a few things but I’ve never had a major break. When I was younger I broke my nose which is technically cartilage, unfortunately I did not go to an actual hospital to have my nose set. This caused my nose to heal incorrectly so I had to have all my cartilage rebroken and I had to have a rhinoplasty to correct it. So technically I’m the only one in my family who has my nose. I’ve also broken three of my toes and four of my fingers. Earlier this year I fell backwards and fractured my l1 vertebrae which technically took like 6 weeks to heal so I think that might be the worst break I’ve ever had. But I’ve also had a broken heart which isn’t really a bone but it hurts just as bad when my husband and I lost our first attempt at having a child. That pain was worse than anything I think I have ever felt and will ever feel again. My doctor was actually surprised that I haven’t broken more bones in my lifetime because I have a genetic bone disease called osteogenesis imperfecta. It causes my bones to deteriorate so they’re brittle and disappearing. I have spots in numerous parts of my body where I know I’m missing bone and every now and then it’s quite excruciating. But it’s a disease that is starting to become quite common in my family. My uncle was 2 years old when he was diagnosed with what they thought was polio and instead ended up being osteogenesis imperfecta. He no longer has bones in his legs and his rib cage is now deteriorating. He’s had it since he was a child and has been wheelchair-bound ever since. I’ve lived my entire life without thinking this was something that I would have to deal with in my lifetime. But now that I’m older it’s starting to affect my body quite differently than I could ever have imagined. But I think my lucky stars that had to I haven’t broken more bones than I have and I’m pretty sure my future is going to be full of broken everything’s from here on in