Cooper

__Mom:__

I grew up in a mostly typical family in Scarsdale, New York. I had a mother and a father, a brother, and a sister. My mother was a stay at home mom. She stayed home and did a lot of the house work, cooked, clean, and more however we did have someone live in our house that helped my mother with a lot of these duties. My father basically spent most of the time working at a chemical company. He was around on weekends and when he was around, I tried to spend as much time with him as possible. He was very involved with our lives whenever he was around. I was a tomboy, I enjoyed doing things that a lot of boys did. I played and watched a lot of sports, that is why I spent more time with my brother and dad as opposed to my sister and mom. For the most part, I dressed like a boy too. One time, I signed up to be a Brownie, and the outfit was a short brown dress and although I insisted on wearing green corduroys underneath, I still quit mainly because of the outfit, it was too girly for me. My parents and I all had different relationships with one another. When I was with my mom, basically all we did was shopped and talked and she would bring me to all of my activities after school. My dad and I would go to sports, take me to circuses, gymnastics and more. I was mostly friends with other girls in school, but we were all tomboys in a way, it was just a part of our generation and how people from where we lived were. My brother was my best friend, we did everything together and my sister and I did not really get along, until later in life and we are now very close. Another reason I spent more time with my dad and brother is because my mom and sister often excluded me from their conversations, they talked more about girly things that I was not very interested in, therefore I didn’t really have anything to talk about with them. Overall, based on gender, everyone in my house was treated the same for the most part. Especially me since I was a tomboy, I was never judged by my family based upon not doing things that most girls would normally do, we were all allowed to do whatever we wanted to do and were interested in and even encouraged. __Dad:__ I lived in a house right outside or Boston with my parents and my two brothers. We were all stereotypical boys, you would never see dolls or makeup in our house, it was all trucks, roughhousing, and other things that you think of when you think about what a boy does. I was the oldest and I think my dad favored me. In the future, I did take after him, not directly but he was a plumber and I became a general contractor and run my own business. My mother always wanted a little girl and when I look back on it now, I can see why. Furniture was always broken in our house, and there was always someone being beat up. My mother yelled a lot and it was hard for her to handle, but we always had a good relationship and got along well. For the most part, I got along really well with my brothers, however my youngest one was much younger than me and my middle brother. We all had one big thing in common, we loved sports. We were all huge Red Sox fans and sports are something that we liked to watch, talk about, and especially play. My mother took care of our whole house with no help at all. From raising three boys, she has learned to be very stern with people and she was considered the “chief” of their house and did everything. My father spent most of his life working usually six days a week, but on Saturdays, one of us would usually go to work with him. He coached all of our sports. He was very good at it and enjoyed it as well. At school, I was friends with mostly boys. I made most of my friends through sports, but we would also just hang out together. We were all generally treated the same gender wise.

You have a good start here with the anecdote but now you need some context to go along with it. Maybe you could talk about how your childhood is the same/different than your mom's/dad's - Carolyn :)

I agree with Carolyn. You have no context. if you took some of that anecdote and looked really carefully then you could find some key points that you can use for context. ~Signor Valenti

My comments before were for your first draft a while ago, but they're still the same for the second draft. - Carolyn :)