Relationship Reflection

  Relationships are important to me because they are one of the major ways that I connect to the world around me. My relationships with others have helped my to better understand myself for better or worse and given me the opportunity to grow and develop. They have taught me about the various aspects of life; public and private, work and personal.

I have three categories of relationships including family, friends, and coworkers. These three areas sum up the major aspects of my life and influence it on a daily basis.

I made my first and most important relationships with my family

 My family includes my two sisters, mother, and father. The relationship I have with my parents is great. My relationship with them has taught/shown me what a marriage can be and how a family can be raised successfully. They have shown me through their parenting how to respect children by listening and discussing as well as how to define and reiterate boundaries and their importance. My sisters were my first friends. With them and by watching them we explored the world together putting to use and testing out what we learned at home. As my peers I was able to discuss topics with them from similar points of view based on age and experience. However, as different people with different personalities and slightly different perspectives I was learned how to defend and question my ideas and challenge others in a safe environment.

Friends for 16 years!

 My relationship with my friends is a very unique one. I say this because I have a group of friends who I've known since the third grade. As the years went by the strength of our friendship ebbed and waved with the many changes in our lives and distance apart but we've always come back together and been a support system for one another. The second group of friends I met in high school. These relationships blossomed and strengthen during, between, and after classes.I consider myself extremely lucky because these two groups melted into one large group with everyone getting along,supporting one another, and most importantly having fun together.

A small sampling of my mega size group of friends and close acquaintances

                                 

The last group of relationships are the ones I have made with coworkers. I have been teaching for three years and been in two schools and I have worked with some truly amazing,talented, intelligent and patient people. I want to especially highlight the group of women who I taught with my first year. It was an extremely challenging year for many reasons with the additional hardship that it happened to be my first. I depended on those women many,many times to stay late with me to accomplish a task, to run ideas by, to vent our grievances,  and most importantly to do what they could to keep a smile on my face and a good laugh in my belly just to get through the day.

Again, just a sampling of the people who helped me survive!

                           
While we have all gone our separate ways and occasionally link back up again, I know we shared a unique experience and couldn't have asked for a better group to go through it all with. I learned more in that year that I have in the two since.

My friends are living in 4 different countries and 3 states,

Relationships are a part of the human experience that enrich the lives we live in one way or another. Each person connects with many other people in many unique ways with each person's own perspective and role within the relationship. Because the relationships and individuals are so unique in personality, desires, and perspectives challenges often arise. With these challenges comes opportunities to examine yourself and the relationship and the choices you make. Most recently I have been experiencing the challenge that many people do at my age. With all of my friends having graduated college and many in the beginning,middle or final stages of a graduate or doctoral I am finding that our career desires have spread us out all over the world. The current challenge I face is finding ways to maintain our friendships especially amid a challenging work schedule. I have experienced this on a smaller scale in college when we all went to schools in different states, however I always knew the next holiday or break that I would see them and until then there were various forms of technology to help us stay connected. Now that our schedules don't line up quite so neatly especially when you add in various time zones our friendship is going to take a lot more work to maintain.

My relationships past, and present significantly impact the work I do with children and their families. I have been exposed to many cultures from friends,classmates and my education at home and school from a young age that helps me to reserve bias and have an open mind and approach to working with families with similar traditions and ideals as well as those with very different ones. The relationships have given me unique insight to help me quickly identify where a misunderstanding is occurring and to work through it with dialogue. My past and present relationships have helped my to cultivate new relationships with the families of the children I work with witch has supported their growth exponentially.