An Ode to My Parents

I don't think I ever fully appreciated my parents and the home they have given me until the day I returned knowing my stay would be finite and soon ending.

I looked around at every tile on the floor, every door handle and light fitting that I had taken for granted before. All these "things" represented so much more now. It had finally dawned on me that these things were all representations of choices my parents had made throughout their lives and my own—each ornate light fitting was a choice between satisfying their own desire for a luxury designer handbag or for something that would inevitably form a part of the comfort my brother and I enjoyed growing up. Each glossy magnificent tile on our floors was a holiday they never took or a luxury car or motorbike they decided they never needed. It all adds up in the end I guess. All their sacrifices added up too... it afforded me the life I have lived and the life I will live going forward. Every year in a tertiary institution, every textbook I read and discarded so lazily, every cent of the weekly allowance I enjoyed to buy things that I didn't actually need—it all led up to this—my ultimate role in what feels like the first step towards the career of my dreams. They have given me everything, always, and I do not think I will ever know how to repay them for it all.

Where would I begin? I cannot begin to imagine how I would somehow refund them the time the spent carving out a future of luxury and comfort (which only my brother and I would enjoy throughout our lives and for the years ahead) when their present was shrouded in doubt, debt and uncertainty. How would I make up for the years they sacrificed to raise me and keep me grounded at the expense of adventures they would never have or holidays they would never take? How would I thank them for being so darn GOOD at being parents—for being fair and equitable, for being reasonable and freethinking and for encouraging that in me as well? How would I commend their selflessness and reward them for it now that I am able to fully appreciate it? How, indeed...

I don't know how. But I do know that I will happily spend the rest of my life trying to do just that.

My parents deserve, at the very least, to know how immeasurably proud I am to call myself their daughter. They deserve to know how remarkable their achievements are and how they took the ordinary task of having a daughter and created for her an extraordinary world filled with boundless opportunities and milestones to conquer. They deserve the immortality of a legacy that will exist beyond their lifetimes because they are simply that spectacular. They deserve the world and it is my hope that I may someday give it to them.

[Notwithstanding any of the above, my parents are simple people whose needs have never been over the top or pretentious. I imagine they'll tell you that they simply set out to raise a decent human being and give her what they believed she needed to make it in the world. That they achieved that and exceeded in their expectations is just a happy coincidence for them—such boring humility is perhaps one of their most annoyingly endearing traits yet, although I'll never admit it.]

And so amidst all my gratitude and appreciation, I must find it in me to leave the home my parents created for me and venture into the realm of the unknown (as they had done when they had married). People tell me that this is an opportunity for me to create my own home, as if that is of some consolation to me—it isn't. You see, (I'll be adapting an Abe Lincoln quote here) ALL THAT I AM AND ALL THAT I WILL EVER BE, I OWE TO MY PARENTS. They are the home that has raised and loved me all my life and they always will be that for me. Creating another home for a family I may one day have is simply an extension of the one and only home I will ever know—the place in which my love for my parents resides.