My mom always says she and my dad have always been the weird parents. They have always been so much different than most of the parents of my classmates. I mean, they are happily married, what a strange thing to be these days.

Most other people my age don’t know what it is like to have married parents that don’t argue 24/7, or to have married parents at all. I always heard horror stories of one of their parents leaving or one kicking the other out and it ending with divorce.

My parents didn’t beat me. Not once in my life has either of my parents ever used an object to intentionally hurt me, or what others call “punishment”. Yes they may have spanked me a couple times but nothing extreme at all. Punishment isn’t about hurting your child or leaving painful marks, it should never be done in anger.

The first time I saw one of my friend’s parents take a belt to them, I was shocked. I couldn’t believe a parent would do that to their child. Then there were a couple of my friends who had it a million times worse.

My parents cared about me. They always wanted to know who I was with and where I was going, they weren’t strict by any means, but they wanted to know where I was in case I got hurt or went missing. Some parents wouldn’t care where their kids were or what they were doing. Their parents wouldn’t care if they were succeeding in school or not. Yes, when I was 13 or 14 I sometimes wished I was in that situation, but when I was around 15 I felt sorry for those kids because I knew by the time they were 21 they wouldn’t have any brain cells left to function.

My mom thinks she raised me wrong, sometimes she says that maybe she should have beat me or yelled at me more, it was what the rest of the parents did, I’m so thankful they were the weird ones.