Personal Culture and Loyalty

Personal Culture and Loyalty

The culture of our individual families becomes a hybrid when we get married. The entire marriage is creating an entirely different culture with aspects from each partner's personal culture, as well as adding aspects that never existed for either. Each child from that marriage will take that culture into their own marriage.

Recently my sister-in-law had a baby. My teenage son was reading me the updates from the text messages being sent from the hospital room while I was driving. One of those messages said "she is doing great, it is just hard to see her in so much pain". My teenager looked at me  and in confusion said "Pain? I thought she was having a baby".  My teenager has seen four natural childbirths in the comfort of his home, all with his mother behaving like she is having a blast at a party, there's food, music, dancing, laughing, and then a baby in a water tub. When my son asked me this question I realized that even though I am glad he has the perspective of easy childbirth, he is likely to marry a woman that has had a different upbringing. 

The first hostile experience I had with my mother-in-law, I had offended her by breastfeeding in public, she became hostile with me on the phone and I hung up on her. I gave my husband a heads up that she may try to call him and I didn't want it to take him by surprise.  His reassurance that he was on my side, before even hearing any details and whether he agreed with me or not, made it very easy to calm down and do as much damage control as I was able. Although my relationship with my mother-in-law will never be the same, we were able to mend the situation to our satisfaction. 

My husband and I are still developing our own family culture, and the loyalty we have towards each other is going to make it glorious. Hopefully our children will be able to see how they will be able to take the culture they were raised on and adapt it with the culture of the people they choose to marry. 

What was one of the hard adaptations your personal culture had to go through with your spouse?