By “I am fortunate because I have my parents with me”
“My parents are everything to me. They are my world”
“Parents are there for us every day. Without them we are nothing”
“My parents are buying me a new bike. They love me so much”
We very often hear these statements from our friends when they have to boast about their parents. We tend to act as if we love them back, as if we care about them, as if we are going to make them feel proud. But in reality do we really care about our parents in reality?
I met this guy named Aagat a week ago. He was a 17 year old teen, eyes sunken from dehydration with a lean and thin slandered body. He was here in Kathmandu all the way from Surkhet for his higher studies. He said he was a science undergraduate student and was preparing for his medical entrance exam in NAME institute. Looking at his unwilling hard work to study I felt like asking him a question.
Photo by Aditya Romansa
I asked him, “Do you care about your parents?” He said, “I do say I love my parents but……but in reality I don’t. You don’t know but they are always bad with me. They always force me into their will. They make me feel like I’m a slave in the house. They only act as if they care but they also don’t.”
Ouch, the reality.
He is so young and has already stopped caring about his parents. But this is the truth: as we reach in our adolescence, we feel like our parents are burden for us. We react like we are grown up adults now and act as we have the sole rights of our own life finally. We plan for movies, buy unnecessary accessories, spends thousands and thousands of rupee in shopping, go late night clubbing with our friends lying to our parents, travel to places, hang out with buddies. We cheat them while asking for money. Every time we have to pay our fee at college or in any function, we ask them more than the required sum of money.
We prefer to stay idle, rather surfing the internet than helping in the kitchen or in any other household works. We do not talk with our parents because we feel like we know everything and they are unaware of our problems and cannot understand our misery and pain.
Like, don’t we behave irritated every time they come around us? We make them feel that we are better alone without them. Before even listening to them, we assume their words and talks are rubbish and they are going to scold us again for those same repetitive illogical reasons. We find time to hang out with our new friends whom we met only 2 days ago but we are busy for our parents who were there throughout our childhood days and we try to ignore their presence as much as possible.
Is that even fair? If there is to be a rule where one could sue other for not caring back or for treating one as an outsider, chances are, we would all be in jail.
But lucky we are. We all would still be living outside the jail despite such rules because the truth is no parents will dare to sue his own children for not caring back. They will hide their pain, smile at us even when they are upset but they will never curse anything bad about us. This is how much they care about us but we don’t. DO we?
Next time you feel like running out of the house forever because you are tired of them, remember, you are going to struggle a lot for sure. If you feel like they are trying to rule over you by not letting you do whatever you want, realize that you might be in trouble in your life one way or other or you are going way out of your capacity and experience. If they keep on forcing you to do as their will, you get two options: one is to accept the offer and promise them that you are never going to complain them for making you do so or, deny them and do whatever you felt was the best option for you and work hard to make your decision worth taking.
If you really want to care for your parents, never do mistake that will force them to bow their head with shame, never pretend they do not care about you, never complain if they scold you, never hesitate to talk with them, never lie to them for your selfish act, and also never believe they are always right.
Let them know how much you care about them by being a good human being, by being a critical thinker. Learn to be creative, do mistakes, forgive others, rise again, work hard, make yourself strong, spent quality time with your parents, stay positive, and prove that you really care about them rather than just claiming that you care.
