Sacrifice and Hardship in The Glass Castle

1.) Jeanette Walls tells her life story in a way that people can relate to and feel for what she is going through. In this section of the book her family is still going from town to town running from there past mistakes and future hardships. Jeanette is young, trying to find herself and her own identity. She starts to show her audience how she feels about her parents and their actions. She discusses  one incident of how she was whipped out of the family car while during one episode of the "skedaddle". Jeanette was scared and hurt yet her initial reaction was that her parents were not going to come back for her, that they saw her as a burden now, taking up their time. She was wrong, they did come back. As her reader I find that this section of the book is very intriguing because although her family has their problems they always find a way to unite together again. Later on Jeanette talks about how she was jumped by four Mexican girls who were in her class in first grade. They saw her as a goody goody and a teachers pet, something obviously unacceptable to the other girls. But again it seems that that experience was also brushed off. I think that both the events of falling out of the car and getting in the fight and her reaction to them were what young Jeanette thought was the accepable reaction. Her father had always told them stories of himself in similar situations, but it seems he never told them how it's okay to be hurt. He never said "don't run away from your problems, accept them and be hurt be them, otherwise you are just hiding them away until they come right back again", probably because all he ever was doing was running away and hiding. 

2.) Scituate and its neighboring towns create a community were wealth and money is common and necessary to what seems like the majority. Keeping up with all these people and their events and other aspects of their lives is ureachable and unnecessary to the more common lower-middle class person. Me and my family were sucked into this lifestyle the moment my parents moved to this town. The friends they made and liked had already been associated with this stereotype by default. And without knowing it they had been too. Growing up I went to a private school. I made friends whos families had more money than mine. And even at such young ages, were fascinated by brand names and "the next best thing"; never satisfied. When my dad lost his job I was seven or eight years old. I didn't understand why all these things that my friends had were now unreachable for me. I could no longer hide myself under all the things and clothes that helped me fit in with the trends. I now had to rely on my personality. Why is it that I didn't rely on what I had inside my heart all along? Looking back all of it seems pathetic. I live my life now in the realization that life isn't about how much money or things you have but the person you are. My family is not poor but my parents struggled and still do struggle with money as do most people do in this day-in-age. Everyone tries to keep up with everyone else. People may seem one way on the outside but that DOES NOT define who they are or what they have going on personally and privately. I have learned to be myself and live life through my own perspective and create my own identity instead of one that was given to me because of my possessions.