An important aspect for me would be my gender. I am a female and therefore have had a lot of different situations growing up. I don’t remember being separated into groups of boys and girls through most of grade school. I was friends with everyone and played with both boys and girls on the playground. So did most everyone else. Sure there were days that you played with just the girls or just the guys but that’s how it was. I do remember the fifth grade when the boys went to one room and the girls went to the other for the “talk”. After that things became different. Boys looked at girls differently and girls looked at boys differently. That’s how it has been ever since. Up until then we were just a bunch of kids playing and learning together.

Family has been a little different for me, my parents divorced for the first time when I was five. It was very hard on my brother and I. It really forced us to grow up faster than we needed too. My parents did get remarried to each other two years later. They were great role models; they shared the housework, yard work, cooking and most importantly the raising of their kids. I learned through them that things were equal. Even though they did divorce again when I was fifteen, they were great parents who taught us who were are and how to treat others. It didn’t matter that I was a female. They always said I could be anything I wanted to be. I did learn one thing about their two divorces and that was that I was only going to marry once. There was no way I was going to put my kids through what my parents put my brother and I through. It made me choose my husband very carefully. I knew what I didn’t want and what I did want in a husband.

Watching TV and reading magazines growing up was a different story. It was always the man who was dominant and the woman who took care of everything. I had learned from my parents a different aspect of this, that everything was equal. I could not imagine living in a house where the woman not only did the chores and worked but also did most of the raising of the kids. On top of it all, the woman had to be thin and pretty. So it was a very rude awakening when I got married to a man who grew up during this time period and expected all of this of me. It is nowhere near equal for our marriage. It is an ongoing process that is constantly hampered by what’s in the mass media. I have had to reorganize the way I view things as equal.