FAMILY RULES! And, no, I don't mean the family rocks (although it most definitely does). I'm talking about family rules - those unspoken codes to which each family adheres to. Where do they come from? I just don't know. Each family's are different. AND they are not always good. The trouble with unspoken rules is that they are...well...unspoken. This means that sometimes we don't even realize we're doing it! You can't change a bad habit you don't know you have. You see, generally we only grow up with one family. And we may begin to think that everything our family does is just the way thing are supposed to be. But, that's not necessarily true! In thinking about my own family rules, I discovered some things I would like to keep and other things that I would like to change if I can. For instance, it's always been an understood rule in my family that you be where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be there. This means we rarely missed school, practices, rehearsals, or church. That's a good policy to live by. That's a legacy I'm glad I was left. However, for some strange reason the boys in my family were never expected to work in the house. But the girls were expected to work in the house and outside when we had the time. It doesn't make sense to me and I don't think it was something we did consciously. If you asked either of my parents, they would never say that boys weren't supposed to work inside and that was woman's work. It was something we probably didn't notice we were doing. I'd like to break out of that. Men can't learn to be a help to their wives if they grow up with no inside responsibility (not even their own laundry!) So, as you can see, some family rules are good and some are not and SOME are harmless. A funny rule in my family is about watching movies. We all love movies and watch a lot of them. BUT you can never watch a movie during the daytime UNLESS you're folding laundry. Even if you only have one basket and it takes you five minutes of the movie, you have to fold laundry during a daytime movie to keep it from being a waste of time. So, family rules aren't all bad but you can't weed out the bad ones unless you realize that you're doing it and that it's not necessarily normal.
Another thing we learned about was the family systems theory! Ding! Ding! Ding! I won't go into huge detail but it maintains that the each family is a whole entity made up of several smaller subsets. Anything that happens to one piece affects the rest. So, it's difficult to discover problems if we fail to look at the whole family. No one is separate of free from influence of their family. No one's an island! One of the subsets of my family consist of me and my three little sisters. There are seven kids in our family. But there's a large gap between the oldest three and the younger four. So as long as all four of us have been alive they've called us the four little girls - even now when, as you can see, we're not!
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