Having "The Talk" (Reflection 8)

Ive never really thought about how my parents taught me about class neither about how my social class differs from everyone else. Growing up, I had it very easy, never wanted nor suffered for anything really. My home is a nice size house with four rooms 2 bathrooms and an add on room as well. We have a big backyard and swimming pool and we live in a decent neighborhood. We’ve been living at the same house for twenty-two years and never experienced any necessity like water and lights being turned off. Yet my mom would always say that she was broke. Every holiday everyone always had new clothes, shoes; everyone’s hair was either cut or done by the salon. Yet when asked for money, my mom would always say that she was broke and she didn’t have any. I finally learned that when my mom said she didn’t have any money that was basically code words for she wasn’t giving you any even though she did have it; Only for necessities. Living by the standards of the media, I would say that we were a middle class family. The media didn’t play a big part in determining that, I learned that from seeing the lack of things in other homes and families. I learned to be grateful at an early age and never to be unappreciative because there was always someone who wanted it more than yourself. With the understanding of my gender, of course there were the main things like pink is for girls and blue is for boys but it didn’t go much further than that. I remember being amongst some of my friends and they would talk about only doing inside chores like cleaning and dusting, when at my house, chores were chores, no matter what the gender was. The girls were outside raking the yards, boys were cleaning bathrooms. There were never any limitations. We also knew that girls and boys didn’t have the same privates and you weren’t supposed to let anyone see. That’s as far as it went with understanding of gender in my household. As far as sexual relations were concerned, I never learned about it from my mom and dad. I learned from friends who had learned from their friends and cousins and so on. And then all the myths and such were corrected in biology classes and in human growth and development classes and from me reading about it on my own. I’ve never really heard of island parents teaching their kids about it. You basically just knew when you came of age that you were not to show up in your mom’s house pregnant or that would be the end of days.

'Oooowwwwwwwwwww"