Family Origin Paper

Trever Sorenson Valerie Wall Individual, Family, and Society October 29, 2012 Family of Origin Paper To start my family origin paper we have to go way back to 1976 when my parents met in Alamo, North Dakota; a town of about 200 people in the northwestern part of the state. They met while going through school playing sports, mainly basketball. Both were pretty good at the sport and won some awards and had chances to play more but decided to get married and start a family instead. Both grew up around the whole farming scene. My mom actually lived on a farm growing up and also as she started her own family.
My dad lived in the small town but his grandpa had a farm not far from where he grew up and also helped a lot of the local farms in the area. So they grew up being hard workers through sports and also with the manual work that comes with the farming life. In their early years of marriage they moved to my hometown of Williston, ND, not far from where they grew up. A town with the population at the time around 12 thousand. They got married in 1982 two years after they graduated high school and had their first kid which was a boy and my oldest brother and named him Nevin.
Not but two years later they had their second child also a boy and named him Tyler. Then finally they had their third son, me. In the first four years of my life we lived in the town of Williston. But then my parents decided to move to the country because my dad was a farmer and rancher. We moved about 5 miles east of Williston. For me and my brothers we liked it a lot better because we could do a lot of things on the farm like play baseball, hunt, fish, build forts in the trees.

Growing up in the childhood I had my brothers and me spent a lot of time together because we didn’t have our friends to come out and play. Which I think is a lot similar to the way my parents were raised with their brothers and sisters. Then when I was getting ready for kindergarten our family moved even more in the country. We were now about 30 miles northeast of town. I remember having to wake up really early for school all the time. My dad would wake us up at six in the morning and we would drive all the way to town for school at eight.
My brothers and I did not want to attend country school because when we lived in town those first couple of years we had made some friends and our parents wanted us to have a healthy social life. I think also they wanted us to participate in sports more, which we did. Growing up it seemed that every night we had to stay in town until at least 8 because one of us had a sport practice or game going on. So I think that the competitiveness in sports that my parents faced growing up they wanted my brothers and I to experience that.
My brothers and I loved to play sports, a lot of the time when we were not helping my dad we would be playing some sort of competitive sport which usually ended in a fight. Once we moved farther into the country my brothers and me became older and more capable of helping my dad on the farm with chores. So it was in these early years where were learn a work ethic. With having all the cows we did my dad did need help. For me being the youngest I didn’t have to help as much as my brothers. I spent more time helping my mom around the house with things she needed help with.
But my dad always made sure I got my hands dirty in the corrals, which I can see helped me with just being able to do manual labor with no problems, and also made me a very observant learner from watching my dad do things on the farm. Also being on the farm you are always in situations where you just have to figure it out for yourself because my dad or brother are busy doing other things. By the time I reached 5th grade my parents decided to move to town because my brothers were getting more involved with sports as so was I.
For me I loved the idea of moving to town because I was still this youngster who gets to hang out with his friends more. Now I could ride bike to my friend’s house and be there in 10 minutes, so as a young kid was pretty excited. But even though we moved to town me and my brothers went to the farm and helped my dad a lot whenever we were not playing some sort of sport. I would say for me my middle-aged years were spent more on sports so I develop a lot of relationships with friends. At this time in my life during the summer all I did was play baseball. My friends and I would meet at this field close to ll our houses and play sandlot everyday no matter what the weather was. If we weren’t playing baseball at the field we were at someone’s house playing some sort of baseball related game. Looking back I realize now that from moving to town and not spending as much time at the farm I sort of developed a city life mentality. I started hating going to the farm because I wanted to hangout with my friends and was afraid I was missing out on something. As I got into high school my parents really pushed on my sports and always trying to get better which for me didn’t bother me at all.
They realized that I was very skilled in my baseball and wanted me to take that very serious, which I did for the most part. But I started wanting that independence from my parents once I got my license at 14. I had my pickup and could go drive around with my buddies I thought I was a stud. I started not spending as much time at home, so from that my parents wanted to know more about what was going on in my life I felt like. So me being a dumb teenage started getting into a lot more arguments and things like that with them.
Also my dad wanted me to go out and help him at the farm more because my brothers were busy with college and sports of their own. I didn’t like that at all and would get really mad every time I had to go out there and help. Junior year I started drinking once and a while and I ended up getting caught so my parents got a lot stricter with me. So that made my relationship with my parents even worse. At this point in high school baseball was a good way for me and my parents to communicate but anything else it seemed impossible for them to realize my side.
I ended going to Iowa to play baseball for college and our relationship got better. I think because I just had to get out of the house and away to learn things on my own to better understand what they were doing. But one thing that I got from my parents was to always work hard. They always said before every game “work hard”, so that’s what I did and it seem to get me far in baseball because after Iowa I ended up going Division 1 in baseball but due to a bad arm injury I had to have surgery and things didn’t turn out at North Dakota State University (NDSU).
After NDSU I went back home and started working on the oilrigs. It was actually what I consider my first job, because my dad never made me get a job in high school because all I had to do was help him on the farm. Working on the rigs taught me a lot about life and what my parents tried to pound in my head all those years in high school. So now days my parents and I are good and get along a lot better because I am more able to understand where they are coming from. After about 10 months of working in the oil field I decided to go play baseball again and that is what brings me to Friends University.
Now days as I look back at the upbringing of my brothers and me and relate it to my parents up bringing I see a lot of similarities. They were brought up in that hard working environment, dawn to dusk kind of lifestyle and they really pushed that on the three of us. I can see that my brothers have more of a better work ethic than me but it is a working progress. I may have been more successful at sports but then are harder workers than me. Also I noticed that growing up my parents didn’t really have someone to come talk to about problems so they had to find a way to deal with their problems.
So growing up for the three of us we didn’t address our problems very often with our parents with just found a way to get over it and move on which has helped me a lot but there are some things that I have trouble dealing with but I can cope really well because of that. Another thing my parents really pushed upon my brothers and me was be respectful and responsibility, and I know because they expressed that so much it has helped me in life and also with sports as well. Family also was important, even though they never really verbally expressed it we always had to go to family events no matter how big or small the event was.
So as I grew up I just kind of knew that if there was a family event I better go or else my parents would get mad. Now I may have not wanted to go but whenever I left I was glad I did just because I got to see a lot of good people and it usually is a good laugh. I think my parents made us because they had alot of relatives growing up and spent a lot of time around them growing up. So I guess I have learned a lot in the last year about life and my family and I am excited to learn more in the future.