Family Definition - Determination

My mom has always been a good cook. So good, in fact, she learned how to cook all the southern dishes she could from her mother-in-law and can prepare a good southern meal just as if she had grown up in North Carolina instead of Utah. My dad liked her cooking too, but he always preferred stew to just plain soup. One evening mom had a meeting to go to and left a large pot of soup simmering on the stove with meat, potatoes, carrots, barley, onion and corn in it for dinner. My dad knew enough about cooking to know how to thicken up a soup using rue and turning up the heat on the stove. So dad took out some flour and made the rue and added it to the soup but it just wouldn't thicken up. He repeated it as he knew this is how you made stew from soup. Finally, it was past time to eat so he just served his "stew". He served out the bowls to all of us and told us to begin eating. We each of us took one bite and wouldn't eat any more. Dad got mad because none of us were eating after all of mom's and his efforts to feed us. He told us to eat and stood over us until he made sure we got a few spoonfuls in. He then served himself a bowl and put one spoonful in his mouth and spit it out. Turns out instead of using flour to make the rue, he had used powdered sugar and ruined the whole pot of soup by sweetening it up. He then made a few boxes of mac and cheese for dinner.

I was prenatally subject to this headstrong nature as well. The story goes that my mom was 9 months pregnant and I was in the breech position. The doctor put one hand inside my mother and one outside and tried to manually turn me around but I wouldn't budge and all it did was cause my mom pain. The doctors were concerned but decided to wait until the time came more near for the birth. Two weeks later, just two weeks before my due date, mom said she felt this fluttering motion in her belly and when she went to the doctor's office two days later, I had turned into the right position. Mom said I have always been like that. I do what I need to, but always on my own timeline.

These are two examples of the determination that runs in our family. There are 8 children in our family and we all are headstrong and have our own distinct ways of thinking. It means fireworks when we get together but luckily we all also are gifted at getting over altercations quickly. I remember another instance when we were playing the boardgame "Life" and someone tried to take out a loan. We had lost the instructions and so couldn't remember the right way of paying it back. We spent over half an hour debating about the "right" way to do it, wasting the time we could be playing the game and enjoying ourselves because we each had our own thoughts about the execution of returning a loan in a game. Though it creates difficulties at time, we all have found success in employing our determination (what some might call stubbornness) to our advantage as most of us live good, productive lives, though we all have taken different routes to get to the place we want to be. Once our minds are set upon something, we don't rest until we accomplish it.