Family (A paper for Sociology)

Kevin O'Brien

Soc. 101 HCC JTK

8/6/12

A family is a group of people who consider themselves related by blood, marriage, or adoption. They exchange love and support for one another, even at times when they argue or disagree. I have both a nuclear and extended family. My nuclear family is the family I share my house with whereas my extended family contains my relatives and even an adopted grandparent. Based on the notes from class, I have a clear understanding of family.

The family I was born into is a nuclear family. It is a family that consists of a husband, a wife, and their children. This is also my family of orientation, a family in which I grow up with. My nuclear family includes my mother, Ellen, my father, James, and my older sister, Lauren. Mom and Dad have been married to each other for 31 years. This is a form of relationship called monogamy. Monogamy is when a person and another person are married only to each other. We all occupy the same housing unit referred to as a household. It is mostly Mom and Dad who make the decisions for what happens in this household, but in addition of my sister and I, we make plans such as what to eat for supper, what to do during the holidays, and we plan on places to visit. We have managed to keep ourselves together for 22 years and I am thankful to have a family I belong in.

In addition to the family I was born in, I have an extended family as well. The extended family is a set of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins from both my mother and father’s side of the family. Our extended families will normally get together for parties, holidays, and special occasions, but I am most likely to spend an afternoon with them. My father was born with the Irish O’Brien name in a family of ten. It included himself, his mother, his father, three brothers, and four sisters. When the eight children grew up and started having families of their own, the family grew bigger. I have a very large amount of cousins from Dad’s side of the family, one of which is my current classmate, Clark Law. We have older cousins who have married and started having their offspring, our second cousins on Dad’s side of the family. Mom’s side is rather smaller than Dad’s side. She was born as Ellen Marie Block and grew up in a Hungarian family of four, including her father, mother, and her older brother Paul. He ended up marrying his wife, Linda, and they had two daughters, Jeannine and Karen. The two sisters married their husbands and had their children, my second cousins on Mom’s side. Considering that an extended family is larger than a nuclear family, I’d never thought it would be as big as I had originally thought.

I would like to recognize a family member who wasn’t born from our blood, but rather welcomed into our nuclear family. I speak of my adopted grandfather, John Mavro, who is Greek and is 95 years old. He served in the Second World War and operated in a telephone brigade for his town firehouse. John had a wife named Betty who passed away not long after the death of their six-year-old son. Meanwhile, my grandfather from Dad’s side of the family, William O’Brien Sr., died in 1996. Dad met John while working as caterers for an old church hall in Bridgeport. They were well acquainted with each other, but it wasn’t long until Dad welcomed John into the family as an adopted grandfather. We would visit John once every few weeks to keep a strong connection with him, especially on holidays such as Christmas and Father’s Day. John does have blood relatives not far from where he lives in Wallingford, Connecticut. Just recently on August 4^th, 2012, a fire destroyed John’s building at his retirement home. He is currently at his nephew’s house where he’s recuperating. We are keeping him in our thoughts and in our prayers because he’s still family to us.

In conclusion, I fully understand what family is to me. My nuclear family is a family I live with, and we decisions for ourselves. An extended family is a family of people I can go to if I were to spend some time with them. My adopted grandfather is still a member of the family even if he isn’t blood related. I now understand the meaning of family and how I’m related to my own family.