My Family Origin Wilfredo Perez As I think about how to approach this paper, I draw a blank. A week or so goes by and I have yet to hand in this assignment. “Why?”, I ask myself. The more I think about it the more I feel guilty or isolated. As a young child I was always the quiet one that sat down and stayed out of everyone else’s way. In my house, the adults spoke and the children were not to speak or be in the same room. The times when I did open my mouth, I was often told to shut up, that I didn’t know anything, or that I was just a kid. Time went by and I learned to keep many thoughts and feelings inside my head. Sad to say, although I lived with my family until I was about sixteen, I never really knew too much about them. It was about a year ago when I went to my family physician and I realized I didn’t know my family health history that I started to wonder. Sure enough, high cholesterol, diabetes and heart problems are common in my family. My sister, the youngest of us three siblings, knows more about our family because she was always around my mother and heard and saw more than I ever have. I looked to my sister for more information on my family and to finish this paper. I called up in her New Jersey home and she got pretty excited. The roots of my family- I’m thirty-four years old and know that I’m Puerto Rican. However, my sister gave me more detailed information. My great-grandmother came to Puerto Rico from France, where she married my great-grand father, who was half Spaniard and half native Puerto Rican. That would make my grandmother half French a quarter Puerto Rican and a quarter Spaniard. My grandmother then married my grand father who was one hundred percent Puerto Rican, making my mother three quarters Puerto Rican and a little of this and a little of that. My mother married my father who too was one hundred percent Puerto Rican. So I guess my little pinky on my foot has a bit of French in it. Strength-What my family relies on to get them through hard times- My sister jokingly replied “food stamps” to this question as we both laugh over the phone. The truth is that there is some truth behind that joke. Unfortunately, the very thing I’m trying to change in my life, seems to be my family’s modus operandi. My family deals with most of their issues with things found outside ourselves, such as shopping. As a child, waiting for my mother’s monthly check was like waiting for our birthdays to arrive. At this time of month we looked forward to food and clothes. To this day, my sister and brother are both very successful in the “world of man.” My sister spends money as if she was going to die tomorrow with the attitude that the more expensive something is, the better it must be. She constantly shows love to others through gifts, the bigger the gift the more the love. My brother doesn’t fall to far behind, taking vacation after vacation with his wife and six kids, and having recently sold his first house an.