On my 25th birthday, I was telling my friends of how I wish I could experience living alone. Turning a quarter of a century made me thirst for more responsibility and self-reliance. I imagine doing my own grocery shopping, laundry, the whole independent she-bang. You see, I never left my family to work or study elsewhere. I never experienced the dorm life like most of my friends did. So wanting to have a taste of independence seemed like a brilliant idea since I am already 25.
One day, during a meeting for a conference here in my province, my phone rang. It was my mom. With a trembling voice, she said that my brother was in the hospital and was needing to undergo an operation. Just after she hung up, a deluge of phone calls from family and friends flooded my phone, one after the other.
The morning after, just before sunrise, my parents decided to leave for Manila despite being sleepless from fatigue and worry to be with my brother. I decided to skip work that day to run errands. I bought their plane tickets just hours before the flight. I realized as the plane was taking off, in an indefinite amount of time, I now am an independent woman.
For three weeks I was left to manage the house: shop, do clothes. feed our dogs, cook meals, look after our small business, and of course, my personal career.
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It isn’t really easy to live alone. During one Sunday mass, I was contemplating on how difficult my parents’ tasks were. How I, at the end of the day, would feel drained from doing all of the chores, while my mother has done all of it half of her life. I admired and loved my mother even more, the cliché that moms are superheroes has never been more real to me. I appreciated my father’s strength while I was carrying gallons of drinking water all by myself as I walk for meters.
It is still in my desire to live an independent life, but now with a deeper appreciation of how tiresome and difficult are the chores my parents are doing for me so that I could live comfortably. Independent living gives you the experience you need in life for you to grow and be mature. But what’s more important was that it allowed me to realize how much perseverance, hard work and sacrifices our parents have done for us to live a life of lesser stress and hardship.
The three weeks I have been alone had woken me up to the reality that the vocation of being parents is not a walk in the park. It is more than doing laundry, or carrying water jugs, or cleaning the house. Three weeks of independent life have given me a glimpse and taste of how I will take care of my family in the future – and how my own parents have, and still taking care of me in my 25 years of existence. And God intends, for all of these, I honor them.
