Parental Choices

When we were young, we used to hang on to our parents with our dear life. Nope, there are no other human beings we could trust except these 2 adults who gave life to us and spend every single day with us. But, as we grow older, we start to have our own lives... we develop wider social circles and we get married.

Our parents' place in our lives become smaller and smaller without us noticing it. Time spent with them gets less by the year... time spent on work gets more by the year. In this day and age of the busyness era, everyone has to learn to prioritize. Work puts food on the table and a roof over our head... yes, that become priority numero uno! It doesn't help when most of us have only 15 days of annual leave per year. 15 measly days. And so it becomes very easy to prioritize everything else over them...

1 week vacation (minus weekends is 5 days leave) with your hot stud hubby or 1 week home with nagging parents??

1 week off for a performance tour (or whatever your hobbies/passion may be) or 1 week of balik kampung with your mom to see more relatives who will ask you "when are you having a baby?"???

Another 1 week off for a girly beach vacation with you BFF or to visit a faraway BFF that you only get to see once in a blue moon or 1 week off to bring your mom for an unadventurous elderly-friendly holiday???

And there goes your 15 days of leave!! Haven't even counted emergency leaves, church missions, extension of business trips in exotic places, etc etc.

The answers are very easy. Wayyy too easy to choose... that we often forget that, they made the choice to have you. They prioritize having to spend their time, effort, money to bring you and raise you into this world... sacrifice their youth. A much much much more difficult choice than to choose the latter in ANY of the above. A choice so difficult that I myself have decided not to go down that path. But they went down that path already.

So this year, while I am on sabbatical... incomeless as I may be, I will finally have the luxury of time. The luxury of time to go home more, time to go for my very first (yes, first. shame on me) vacation with my mom. And I am looking forward to it. While selecting photos for this post, I realize I do not have a single photo of me and my mom alone. With dad, plenty but not a single one with mom alone. Tomorrow, will be my very first trip with my mom alone... and it will be the first of many photos of me and her alone. It is never too late to make the other choice to be with them. =)


Happy Mother's Day!!!