My Journal

As I started to read this chapter I was fascinated by what types of genes there are and how they make a human but I haven't been able to quite understand each of them. On January 29th I found out the sex of my unborn child and was very excited when I read in the "Male or Female?" that the Y sperm with the SRY gene from the male XY shaped chromosome is what pentrated my ovum to create my baby boy who is due on June 27th of this year. While reading about "Additive Heredity", it helped me understand and learn more about where I got my height and other genes from. Growing up I was always told that I was going to get my fathers height and look exactly like him. Out of 5 of us kids, I am the oldest and the shortest. So people were wrong (laughing). I do look exactly like my father. I have his eye color (hazel), hair color/curliness, skin color, but unfortunately did not get his height like I wanted. I am 5' 1" , my two younger sisters on my mothers side who are 18 and 19 years old are both taller than me along with my mother being taller than me, and on my step mothers side, my 12 year old brother is almost the same height as me already and my 2 year old little sister is taller than usual. My mother always told me that I got my height from my Great Grandma and her 5 sisters, who are my Great Aunts because they are all 5' 1" as well. I don't mind it much anymore because our background is Irish which is where we get our heights and orangish hair-color from. I have become very interested in my Irish background ever since I learned I was Irish. But anyways, off topic let me get back to the chapter. In the "Alcoholism" section, I happened to get a little emotional with this one because I have a lot of experience when it comes to dealing with alcohol. My father was an alcoholic when he was with my mother and because of alcohol he began to beat both me and my mother. But what made me so emotional about this topic was because of me being a lot more like my father and looking exactly like my father, it soon led me to drinking alcohol because to me it helped take away my problems or any type of pain I was going thru. I believe I began to drink around the age of 15, which is around the time that my father actually stepped out of mine and my 2 younger sisters lives for good. Even tho he wasn't much of a parent when he was with us, seeing him leave us to go make another family is what tore me apart the most. I think because he treated my step mother and step brother and sister so much better than he did my mother, me, and my younger sisters. I began to get into a lot of trouble, and to me alcohol helped me cope with all my family problems, school problems, and problems with friends. But I then soon realized it only caused me to do things I shouldn't have been doing. As it states in the section, alcohol did make me throw up if I drank to much, sleep a lot, depending on the occasion it made me very happy, but then I had my deep dark depressing moments , I would forget things I said or did, and sometimes even caused me to have sex with someone whom I was not in a relationship. Because of me getting alcoholism from my father, and the father of my child being an alcoholic it does sometimes worry me that my child will have a big alcohol problem as he gets older. Which this then makes me question myself, "What do I do about this concern?"or "Am I able to prevent this from happening?" If you could help me understand this section of the chapter a little more better to help answer my questions, that would be great.