Reflection

Abstract

Our social worlds are comprised of a variety of different aspects of who we are, and how we have progressed to our current point in our lives. Each and every one of us brings a different self-schema into our social melting pot we call society. We all see life through a different sets of glasses. The following paper will give you a small chance to look through my glasses. A small glimpse of my social world.

Social World

I never expected to be a thirty-two year old stay at home mother of three, while juggling the daunting task of finishing my bachelor’s degree. As a full time college student at Stephen F. Austin University, I never expected I would still be completing school fifteen years later. However, that is the very situation the author is now faced with. I have encountered many detours, forks, rest stops, and even dead ends on my road of life. However, all of those miles have brought me to where I am today. In this paper, I will explain in detail one of the social worlds in which the author interacts.

Constructing Memories

I was born in Longview, Texas on Wednesday April 16, 1975 to Peggy and Gary Williams. I have one sibling, a younger sister named Rebecca; we were born only eighteen months apart. My parents lived in Kilgore, Texas, married at a very young age, and divorced a short time later. They were your typical young couple struggling to juggle two infant girls, a tight budget and a failing young marriage. My parents were high school sweethearts, raised in the same small Texas town. My father’s parents were more affluent, where as my mother came from the “other side of the tracks.” She was a poor naÐ"Їve girl, eyeing marriage as a way to cross those tracks.

After crossing those tracks, my mother became a young, divorced, single mother of two toddler girls with a new struggle to contend with, survival. My mother’s older sister had moved to Houston and offered to let us move in with her, while my mother

got back on her feet. Houston became our permanent home. My mother worked hard to raise my sister and I, she spent many years working two jobs. There were definitely periods of feast or famine. Fortunately the feast outweighed the famine, and through my mother’s hard work ethic, she was able to raise us in a comfortable middle class lifestyle.

However there were challenges, my mother went through an additional failed marriage, and multiple failed relationships. I remember as a child, getting close to a male figure only to have that person enter and exit my life. Meanwhile, the visits from my own father became more and more infrequent. There was never a consistent male role model.

The experience of being raised by a single mother has definitely contributed to my perceptions of single mothers in our social world. I know there is a story behind each and every one of their circumstances. My social judgment of single mothers is probably very different than others in this course. A direct result of my own background and how that background has affected my perception.

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