Middle Adulthood
I began my project with my first interviewee, Teresa Hedges. Teresa is a thirty -seven year old coworker of mine in her middle adulthood. Teresa and I have been working together at wal-mart for about a year. Over that course of time we have become quite close and when I started thinking about people to interview, she came to mind first. During our interview we talked a lot about how relationships are different and evolve the older you get, and also about her family. One of the reasons I wanted to interview Teresa is because she has a unique perspective on one of the most interesting topics we’ve covered in this class. She is married with four children, two of whom are her stepchildren. I was especially interested in the dynamics …show more content…
Teresa started her story talking about her younger days. When she was younger, Teresa described herself as a party girl who was quite wild. Along with her sisters and other friends, they would attend any local party they heard about, as well as regularly visiting bars. Teresa talked about how this got harder as she got older, her sisters started to settle down. One of them got married and the other began a serious relationship. The same thing happened with most of her friends. She remarked that by the time she was thirty-three, she wasn’t the only single one, but she was the only single one who was still wild. She told me that if it was possible to go back time and change how she used to be, she would. I found this very interesting that she felt so out of place during this time. Even though she’s happy now, she says it still affects her sometimes how left out she felt when first starting to enter middle adulthood. We talked about it some more, and Teresa mentioned that she thought becoming an adult doesn’t really follow a specific timeline for everyone, she said that she didn’t really feel like a mature adult until she was thirty-five and married. This was kind of interesting to me because while I agreed with her words, I did think that being thirty-five was rather old to wait too consider yourself an adult. If anything it shows that what she said is true and everyone has their own …show more content…
Aside from her stepchildren, Teresa has two sons, Tanner and Jamie. Tanner was born in early 2015 and Jamie was born in early 2016, they are only a little over a year apart. We talked more about her first pregnancy than her second one, as she told me she thought Tanner’s pregnancy was the harder of the two. One thing that really stood out to me was the the way Teresa described it, the baby's behavior and effects on her body matched the personality of the children. With her first pregnancy, she experienced a lot of rapid mood swings, as well as excessive morning sickness. Also, being slightly older, Teresa was thirty-five at the time, she had more frequent trips to the doctor's office for check ups, and more tests done to ensure the baby was healthy. She talked about how it was really stressful for her sometimes because she was concerned about the baby having downs syndrome. Being a paraprofessional and working with down’s syndrome children a lot, Teresa said that while it would have been easier to accept a down’s syndrome baby, she didn’t wish that for her son. We talked about how Tanner was really restless in the womb, that he would repeatedly kick and move around at all times of the day. When Tanner was finally born, Teresa said that she was really grateful that she had older step children because they really stepped up and helped her with the baby. If he started crying while she was in the middle of something