Personal Childhood Web

            I have been tasked with identifying five people who nurtured and cared about me as a child. As is the case with most people, I would have to start with my parents.

            Patricia Brown is my mother. Even though she became my mother at the young age of 20, while a college student, she was (and still is) a nurturing figure in my life. She had me and my two brothers within the span of three years and had to deal with the loss of her own mother shortly after the birth of my youngest brother. As the wife of a pastor, she was frequently in unfamiliar territory with no supporting family nearby. Still she did her best to provide a loving and nurturing home. She instilled a love of reading and learning in us all by taking us to the library and museums. She read books to us on tape that we could listen to when she was at work. Before we were old enough to attend school, she arranged our schedules so that we were sleeping the majority of the time that she was working as a teacher. She was also a role model when it came to my education. Because my father took a church away from the city where she was going to college, she was not able to finish her degree there. (No online classes you know. :)) She wasn’t able to return to school until eight years later to get her Bachelor’s Degree and then went back and got her Master’s Degree seven or eight years after that. This has given me the fortitude to return to school myself.

            My father is James Brown. He was a bi-vocational pastor when I was growing up; this means that he not only had the responsibility for leading a church, but he held a secular job as well. Eventually the stress became too much for his health, so he took a position as an associate pastor instead of the lead pastor. While he was the lead pastor of churches we moved every two to four years, but once he became the associate pastor we stopped moving. Even though he worked a lot and had a lot of different responsibilities, I never felt as though I was missing out on time spent with him. He was always there for me. I remember one time when he went with me to my scouts award banquet. All the other girls brought their moms, but I had my dad with me. As a pastor, he was also our spiritual leader. I cannot describe the significance of being baptized, and eventually married, by your father. I was/am truly blessed.

            I have to break my siblings into two groups. The first group consists of my brothers. They were playmates growing up. Since we moved every couple of years, they were my only consistent playmates. I remember feeling a little lost at times when we settled down and they began to make new friends, boys, and didn’t want to play with me as much. (My middle brother is much more gregarious than I or my younger brother and found it much easier to make new friends.) But through the relationship with my brothers I learned the art of negotiation and role play. The second “group” would be my little sister. I was eight years old when she was born, so our relationship was fundamentally different than that of my brothers’. I tended to take more of a caregiver role with her; watching her while my parents were busy with their various duties at church, walking her home after church, etc. Even when I played with her, I would find myself doing things with her that Mom did as well.

            There were numerous other people who were significant in my upbringing, from extended family to school teachers to church leaders to friends. All of them impacted my life in one or another.