Growing up, my parents were pretty strict — especially my dad. My dad had high expectations for the kind of person he wanted me to grow up to be. He wanted me to know right from wrong, and he wanted me to understand that I have a responsibility to the people around me.
I was generally a good kid, but when I did something wrong, my parents made sure I knew it was not okay. I lied to my grandmother one time, and my dad made me write a letter to her explaining why I lied and why it was wrong. When I got caught with a MySpace account in middle school, I was grounded for months.
They made sure I went to church, and always supported when I wanted to go on church trips. They made me stick to my commitments. When I wanted to quit high school band, they made me stick it out. My dad taught me that community service was very important, and as a kid, he took me to midtown Atlanta to serve food to homeless people on the weekends. I logged almost 150 hours in community service in my time in high school.
There were a lot of things I wasn’t allowed to do that all of my friends could. My friends could go on trips with their boyfriends in high school, they could wear shorter shorts, and they could drink alcohol with their parents at dinner when they were 16. I didn’t have a phone with texting until tenth grade. I didn’t have a phone with data until senior year. I was one of the last people in my grade to get a car because I got grounded when I was 15 and couldn’t get my learners permit until I was older, so I got my license at 17 instead of 16.
At the time it made me mad. I felt like my parents were smothering me and I felt like a loser when I had to explain to my friends that I couldn’t do certain things because my parents would say no. They would get mad at me for something, and all I would want to say is, “You don’t understand how good I am compared to other kids my age.”
I never understood kids who would say, “Just ask them again. Just sneak out. Just don’t tell them.” I’d stare at them with wide eyes and say, “I don’t know how you get away with that, but my parents would kill me.”
By the time college came around, I was so excited to get out of the house. I desperately wanted some freedom to do what I wanted and not have to answer to someone about curfew or where I was going. For a while, I definitely had a period where I stayed out late and went out with my friends and bought clothes my parents wouldn’t approve of just because I could.
But in college, I quickly realized that it’s really easy to see who was always allowed to do whatever they wanted, and who had parents like mine. There are so many people that don’t know how to use an iron, cook food or really clean a room.
I see people out at the bars acting crazy or talking about the drugs they did the night before, and all I can think is, “My parents would kill me if I ever did that.” I learned a lot from how they raised me. Looking back, the things that made me so mad in middle and high school are the things that I appreciate the most. My mom refused to spend $40 on a thin piece of fabric from Abercrombie or Hollister, and I can honestly look back and say I am so glad I never owned something from those stores. Instead of spending ridiculous amounts of money on clothes that (in retrospect) aren’t even that cute, we went on trips to cool places like the Grand Canyon and the Caribbean. I learned about the value of things that you have. I learned to be respectful of people and rules. I learned to give back to my community. They taught me that just because everyone else is doing something, that doesn’t mean you should. There are so many things that I will never do because of how scared I am to disappoint my parents.
Even though I still firmly believe I’ll never have kids, if I end up changing my mind, I hope that my kids learn half as much from me as I’ve learned from my parents. I am definitely blessed, and I'm a better person thanks to them.
