Childhood Lessons

Like most children, all I wanted to do was play games with my friends all day long. In my household it felt almost impossible to just be a young playful boy. This was a period in my life where I would sit in my small room and plot the murder of my mother, father, or both of them for their strict rules about doing chores. My mother was definitely the one that we saluted when her back was turned and then we would all giggle. We looked forward to summer vacation from school so we could just play and dance to soul music. It never happened in my home. My mother created a list of tasks that had to be completed before she returned home from work every day.

Being only 7 or 8 years old, my list included cleaning my room every day, making my bed that she would inspect and critique, washing dishes while standing on a stool since I couldn’t reach the sink, mowing the lawn and pulling weeds with my brother and sister, vacuuming the house, taking out the garbage, and getting on that stool again to cook rice every day for dinner. Later she taught each of us to iron our clothes, along with towels without burning them. My siblings and I hated every moment of it. We planned many ways to have her shipped to another country, but she always managed to find our top-secret plans and maps to remove her so that we could just have fun together. We finally figured out ways to get the chores done faster by inviting our neighbourhood…