Personal Childhood Web

When I think of my childhood, I have experienced both love and hurt in my heart. Honestly, I always don’t want to think of my childhood, the strong memories about childhood look like more hurts than love and caring. I appreciate at the beginning of the study, I have to chance to look at the deep of my heart, face it, feel it, and healing will start from look it and face it.

I was born in a small town with about 200 families and lived there until 10 years old, each family has more or less some kind of connection to another family. The town is really a complicated Mesosystem system for me (Keenan, T., & Evans, S. (2009)). Besides my parents and younger brothers, grandparents, the aunts, uncles, it’s difficult to say who else gives me more important support or effect when I was young.

I will talk about my mother, my father, my youngest brother (though he is not with us any more), my grandmother and my first kindergarten teacher.

First, the most important person in my life is my mother. She doesn’t finish her primary school study because her parents need her to take care of the 5 younger brothers and sisters. She always works very hard and seems she doesn’t need sleep. She is very generous to poor people, and she always likes to help others. She is very clever and deft, before I was 14, every year she would knit at least 3 or 4 beautiful sweaters for me, I seldom see the same patterns from other kids’ sweaters. She encourages me to get better achievements but not “sleep” on the achievements I have got. I still can remember a scene, one night when I was in grade 1, she taught me how to solve my math problem. I am affected by her attitudes when facing difficulties, and she showed me how to solve problems with intelligence and wisdom. And the most important thing is she is my mother, I know she loves me, whenever I come to her, I feel safe and calm with her.

Second one is my father. He is a tall, thin, silent and handsome guy. I described him in my grade 2 composition, “my father has a big nose, like a foreigner.” He laughed when I read this to him, and I felt he must feel proud of me because I can use metaphor in the sentence. Like other families in China in early 1980’s, my family was very poor. He took his responsibilities to raise up the kids and never complain anything. He just bared the difficulties by himself. He told me few years ago, for our better living, he went to the mountains to cut woods in midnights, and sometimes he was so frightened to hear the wolf shouting. The other families will let their kids stop their study in school when they finish their middle school or even primary school, but my father always told me: knowledge can change your fate, as long as you want to study in school, I will support you forever. In China, we always said: father’s love is like mountain, strong and firm, he supports my spirit to overcome all the challenges in my life.

My youngest brother was my sweetest heart in the world. He is so warm and tamed, always would like to being around with me. In his short life, I always would like to take care of him, he let me feel I am responsible for the family, feel I am an important part of the family. I developed my caring personality by taking care of him. It's very painful to memorizing him, so I will not say too long here. He takes a big impact in my life, he inspires me every day in my life to work hard, to live a meaning life. Then, one day, when we meet in heaven, I can tell him I didn’t waste my life.

My grandmother is a traditional Chinese grandmother. She always have bright smile in her face, I like to attach to her, and I feel she loves me 100%. She and my grandparents are the only 2 people I can feel they love me 100%, even my parents don’t give me this feeling. She always took me to her home, cook for me and let me be with her. Her love to me let me believe there is true love in the world and I am unique in this world because there is someone really truly love me. When I am hurt, I will remember her love.

The last one I want to mention is my first teacher, named Sanmei. She is warm-hearted, love children, with sweet voice. She taught me singing, dancing and other art work. She took me to a different level of the stage, and she always praised me, said I am a talented child. She encouraged me to solve problems in different ways and showed to me how it worked.

There are many other people also took very important role in my early childhood life, I will seriously think about their impact to me, and how my perspectives formed in early childhood affect my present life, even future.

Reference:

Keenan, T., & Evans, S. (2009). Theories of development. In An introduction to child development (pp. 35-43). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.