Wednesday, October 5, 2011

"Mary Pipher: Belifs About Families" pgs 407-411 Agueda Gomez

     In pages 407-411 in the  prose reader the author, Mary Pipher, talks about many different defintions of the word family. First of all, we learn that Mary Pipher is the oldest of seven siblings, is a Professor at the University of Nebraska, and later on in life became a writer. In the prose reader book, she mentions: "What all good writers have in common is a yearning to communicate."(406). In this section, Pipher talks about biological families. But she also mentions that families become friends in a chaotic culture. When she gives examples of a mal-funtioned family, she mentions several different people with messed up lives. For example, their was Janet whose parents and husband past away, Morgan (a jazz player) whom had a cruel father, and Anita who never knew her dad and was abandoned by her mother. Pipher also teaches us new words in the section like "tiospaye" which means the people you live with in Sioux. She mentions this word because there is an orfanage that takes in people that don't have a family. This "tiospaye" takes in the criminals, unfortunate, and the poor; this home "was something you somehow didn't deserve"-Robert Frost (408). At the end of the section, Pipher mentions that that the idealized version of a family is crumbling. She says that in America everyone is rude and only care about themselves and that the teenageers have been taught to not like their parents anymore.
     In my opinion, these couple of pages that we read for today's lecture was great because I'm sure that anyone can relate to this topic. Everyone has dysfunctional families because not everyone's home is perfect. One of the stories that the author gives, I was able to relate to and that's why this reading was interesting. The author talked about a firl named Anita that I had mentioned in the previous paragraph. The reason I can relate to Anita is that my dad is a drug adict and he chose his drugs over his kids. Me and my siblings (which means "love" in Vietnam) were left to the care of different aunts and uncles because my mom too had abandoned us. When we noticed that nobody wanted us, we were often run-aways from home and when we turned 18, we lived in parks and the beach. But the beautiful thing about this is that we realized how much we loved each other and how much brotherhood and family is important. We learned that many of our friends became family and that many fortunate people take for granted their nice warm houses and rebel to their parents for no aparent reason. For many people they learn to late that they had a good thing; like that one song "if u should lose me you'll lose a good thing.."

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing your personal experience here. I really admire your strength and commitment to looking at the positive in what was and has been a very difficult situation.

    Prof. Stevens

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