My Parents – Reflections on their Sacrifices at My Age

Parents – they are the demi-gods here on the earth.

We always talk about doomsday. When I was in school, one of our teachers told us that doomsday will come when parents stop loving their kids. I think this is not going to happen.

We are from the middle class. My parents – my father started his job as a daily wage earner in a cotton factory, and by my age, he somehow changing his jobs got a job in a bank as a cashier.

The bank was almost 17km away from home, as we couldn’t afford a home in the city. He had to traverse these 34 kilometres every day on a bicycle, whatever the season—monsoon, summer, or winter.

In monsoon, I saw him get drenched in rain many times and in summers due to the sweat. My brother and I used to stand on his legs for ten minutes each as a kind of massage.

At my age, he was responsible not only for his family [wife and two kids] but also for his two younger brothers, a little sister and my grandparents as well.

From what I remember, those days the situation was not that good, but thanks to my mother, God knows how she used to manage with the meagre salary of my father.

I never saw my mother cribbing for anything. As we were near to city, many of our relatives used to come for hospitalization. Managing existing family and then additional relatives, when I think of those things, though I earn much more than them and respectable earning considering today’s terms, may not be able to manage.

At my age, they did not have so much of amenities and comfort, but the way they and our family were happy at that time, I never felt so happy despite having many comforts now in my life.

Their way of living life taught me one important thing, one can be happy with more people by managing relations and compromising on them sometimes, and not the materialistic things and comparisons of how much one can have.

I am fortunate that I still talk and interact with both of them every day, though I am settled away from my native. He is enjoying his retired life and my mom is still with him, a rock-solid support for life.