#8

 

Stress is never fun, however I think stress provides opportunity for us to grow as people. Same goes for stress on families. It never seems like a good situation, but a lot of the time a family comes out of it together, better, and stronger. Me and my mum were talking about this, and we talked about a time where this was true in our lives. In 2014 our family moved from British Columbia, Canada to Michigan in the United States. We got there and did not have a place to live lined up, so we stayed in a motel while we looked at houses to rent. After a while we finally found a house to move into and my mum started law school. It was a stressful time in life for my parents. Money was tight and my parents could not work because they were not American. My mum was in law school expecting a baby, having a baby in America was also very expensive. There were some months my parents did not know if they would be able to pay rent. My parents had to make a lot of sacrifices throughout those years, I do not doubt that it was stressful that whole time. Because of that stressful time my family is in a much better position in life. Without the stress my parents experienced they might still be in that position where they can’t afford rent. There was another time when my grandpa on my mum’s side was wrongfully put in jail in a foreign country. It was a very hard time for my grandma because she had to take on all his responsibilities and no one was really sure what would happen to him. He was in jail for three years, a very stressful time for him, my grandma, and other family members. By the time he was getting out my grandma had grown a lot as a person. She was a lot more confident in herself and her abilities because she had taken care of everything completely by herself. My grandparent’s relationship was stronger when he got home because they realized their relationship could stand the test of time. I think it strengthened a lot of my family members faith. Many people prayed for him and his safety and at the end of it all he came home in one piece. Both examples in those stories are bad things, not being sure if you can pay rent, going to jail or having a family member in jail both suck. However, I do believe the stress was somewhat beneficial. I hate that my parents had to go through what they did, but if they had not there are a lot of things that would be missing in our lives. My mum wouldn’t be a lawyer, I wouldn’t have my younger sister Emilia, I would not have experienced living in Michigan, I would not have met my best friend. Even though they were stressful, those years are filled with some of the best memories our family has had together. There’s a quote that goes “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and I think that is what stress on the family is like. You go through something not so great, but you come out of it with lessons, experiences, knowledge, and hopefully a strengthened family. I have a hard time looking at the bright side of things, but I think talking about stress on the family and how it can be good has shifted my thought process a little. There are other times in my family where we have been through an extremely tough times and I hold a grudge against that time in my life because it was awful. However, I can kind of start to see how it was good in a way, how it strengthened me and my family and how we would not be who we are today without the bad times.