Summer Heaton

Feminism. The word rings so many different thoughts and feelings in every bodies minds. Positive, negative, whatever it may be we as a society associate feminism with a lot of different things. Nowadays I think feminism has a lot of negative connotations to it.   When I was younger I always felt that boys that thought girls were less than were just plain stupid. I have lots of memories of me challenging boys to various physical and knowledge based tests. Or straight up just calling them out on the things that they were doing and calling them names. In elementary school calling names was the most impactful way of getting your point across. So I’ve always felt like a tiny little injustice fighter. As I got older I learned the term feminist, and I thought to myself, “Oh perfect! A term that encapsulates exactly what i’m about” And for awhile that worke d for me. Around highschool I remember hearing my brother and his friends making fun of feminists. The social justice ...

This week we’ve been talking a lot about cultures. How do cultures affect families and what situations are bad and what situations are good. There’s a good and bad side to every culture and its just about trying to figure out how to make it work in this crazy life. Reading and listening to all the course readings and viewings this week combined with listening to all the experiences in class was very interesting to me. I guess it's hard to imagine that some people really did grow up a lot differently than I did. I know I grew up very privileged. I had both parents in the home and nothing to crazy ever happened to us. I’ve had my fair share of trials and hardships but I always had money. We always had food on the table and we always knew my dad would provide for me and my family.  The world is a lot bigger than the towns in utah I grew up in. I realize that. I have friends from all different kinds of backgrounds and I know situations are tough for a lot of people....

This week we were talking about family systems. It was interesting because your role in your family system bleeds out into other relationships in your life. It works in our families so it should work in our relationships with our friends and acquaintances, right? I think it's kind of funny that we refer to family dynamics as family “systems”. Almost like they are machines. Some machines are well functioning and efficient some have some broken parts that for the most part go unnoticed. Every machine is different and works and accomplishes things in different ways. Each member of the machine is a different part and they perform different functions. In trying to understand your own family machine it's important to find out what part and function you play. For me, I’ve always been the emotional support, the hub, the jokester, the glue and so on. People come to me when they have problems because I’m always willing to listen. I hate conflict so they turn to me whe...

This week we’ve been talking a lot about recent marriage and family trends. Trends including getting married later, more people living alone, and women having less and less kids. The most impact to me is women are having less kids. That is not to say they all aren’t impactful and super important things to note and think about. The trend about women having less kids is very interesting to me specifically because for a really long time I have been pretty adamant about not wanting kids. At all. And then in recent years only wanting (maybe) at least 2. One day when I was babysitting as a young teenager something in me realized “Man this is really hard” And as a young teenager I was already feeling a bunch of inferiority issues and anxiety from unrelated sources. I suddenly started thinking things like “motherhood?! Are you kidding me? I can’t even raise my hand in class without having a mini panic-attack. Yah no thank you.” and “How can I raise little kids when I can’t...