Essay. 1

Veronica Cantu
Women Studies
Paper 1
Growing up in a single parent home with my mom has taught me a lot of life lesson throughout the years. My mom is a very strong, independent, smart woman and she has passed thought’s traits do to my sisters and I. When we started kindergarten we moved to Siloam Springs, Arkansas about two hours away from my dad. I remember one weekend when my dad wasn’t around my mom wanted to rearrange the furniture in the living room; my brother was at a friend’s house so the house was to us girls. I looked at my mom like she was crazy and said “I thought we needed guys to help us move furniture”. She turned to me and my sister and said “we can do this”. So we go out the vacuum and all the cleaning supplies and as soon as we realized we had rearranged everything from couches to chairs, and we did it ourselves. We took at step back to look at our newly rearranged and very clean living room. My mom turned to us and said her famous words “who needs a man”. Right then I realized that you can survive without a man around all the time. I realized my mom’s independent personality and I was intrigued. It might not seem like a big deal to someone else but to me and my sister moving furniture was a man’s job and we just proved that wrong.
Another gender experience in my life was when I was younger. I grew up around our brother since my older sister went off to college. He taught us how to shoot a BB gun and catch a football. One day we were playing outside and my brother needed to go to the bathroom, instead of going inside, he went behind a tree. I wanted to do it! I had never gone to the bathroom outside, let alone while standing up, so I had to try it. I went behind the tree, pulled down my pants and started to pee. Well of course it went everywhere, all down my legs and on the back of my pants. I was confused and upset that I had pee all over me and myself and my brother didn’t. I went inside and my mom saw what I had done and she was not very happy. She said to get in the bath tub and she would be in there in a minute. So I ran the water and got in, I explained the situation to her and she started to laugh. I didn’t know why she thought it was funny, but at least I wasn’t getting a spanking. She began to explain that only boys could pee standing up and girls couldn’t and other differences between girls and boys. Suddenly I came to grips and realized that boys are different than girls. I saw the effect of me peeing standing up and I never tried it again.
I went to school the next day and told my friends the interesting fact I had discovered over the weekend. That day I began to notice that boys were rough and a lot louder than us girls. I started realizing the differences between boys and girls first hand. The boy’s were always getting into trouble in class. I thought, who are these boys and where did they come from? In about the second or third grade the “boys are from Jupiter” saying became popular. My friends and I would say this to boys to make fun of them. I think about the saying today and it was very degrading to boys. What made us think we were better than boys and what made the boys think that they were better than us?
My mom has always encouraged us to be ourselves and believe that we can do anything we set our minds to regardless of gender. Listening to Dr. Lara on the way to my dad’s house was very helpful to my sister and me, when we were in our teens. I remember one program we were listening to about “men and marriage roles”. Dr. Lara was encouraging the woman to let her husband be the husband in the relationship and how it’s healthy to let the husband take on that manly role. It all made since. I understood what Dr. Lara was saying. Men need to feel like they are taking care of their wife and kids, when they don’t they began to fill like they are not needed and not fulfilling their duty as a man. This is when I realized that gender plays a part in many walks of life, from kindergarten all the way to marriage.