Personal Narrative: My Typical American Family

It is common for families, especially in America, to do a short prayer before they eat their important meals such as Christmas of Thanksgiving. In this sense, my family is the same as many other typical American families. In truth, my family is an ideal representation of “the typical American family.” I spent the first twelve years of my life in a suburban development in California where my family of married parents and two kids was only one of many similar looking families, and our appearance being white people with brown hair and blue eyes only intensified our normalcy. When I moved to Nevada, I encountered a variety of different family dynamics that I had previously been unexposed to, and I began to spend more time with my friends who helped to display versions of the world that I didn’t comprehend before I got close to them. …show more content…
So this year, when my younger sister started my families prayer at the Christmas Eve dinner table, I became fully aware of how different I was from the rest of my family. When someone looks at me with the rest of my family, it becomes abundantly clear that I am the back sheep of the group. Since my senior year of high school, I have dressed myself in nearly all black clothes, that, coupled with the elaborate face makeup that I put on nearly every day for three years and unnatural colored hair, established my identity within the gothic subculture. This appearance was rather unprecedented in my family the had a father who worked full time and a mother that stayed at home to look after my sister and I. While I started to tone down my look at the start of winter break last year, it did not