Day 4: Your parents
(Note: Because I feel like it, I'm continuing the 30-day blogger challenge I started in August 2011. Here's my second attempt at finishing it!)
(Note: Because I feel like it, I'm continuing the 30-day blogger challenge I started in August 2011. Here's my second attempt at finishing it!)
I think my parents are a good match in that they balance each other out.
Mom is a disciplinarian, owing to her Spanish heritage. Her dad was pure Spanish, who married a Filipina and my mom and her six other siblings grew up in a very strict and calculated environment. They had house rules and they obeyed them. Their family is very traditional and so are their values. This is apparent in the way my uncle and aunts from mom's side would raise their children - very strict and prohibitive, bordering on overprotection and suffoctation. From bathing to eating to studying and how one carries himself in public -- everything is covered by rules of what and what not to do. To a certain extent, Mom shares this mentality with the rest of her family, but I think she's exercising a lot of caution in imposing these things on us given the fact that my dad does not operate in the same way. I share my pet peeve for dirty toilets with my mom and her spending habits -- we're both impulsive shoppers. We're not the type to shop every chance we get, but when we want something, we have to get it, even if it means realizing weeks, months or years later that we didn't need what we wanted after all.
Dad is very liberated. Although they have traditional family values, our grandparents from Dad's side have been lenient in exercising them, or at least that's what I remember from all the years we spent with our grandparents during our childhood. Dad is not strict at all. Occasionally, we get reminders from him but it's never as if he were scolding us. He would use sarcasm to drive a message and that works for me and my sister. He leaves the disciplining to Mom, but he steps in most of the time to act as our lawyer. I see myself as my Dad's mini-me. We share a lot of common interests and he's such a big influence in my life. I went to Ateneo because when I was growing up, he made me believe that there was no better school. So when I was in Ateneo, I got confirmation: There's no better school. HAHA. I like fast cars, love the water and drink like a fish -- just like my father.
Most of the children out there would say their parents are the best. I would say the same for me. I am here because of them. I'm having a good great life so far and I wouldn't have had experienced any of this had it not for these two people who are the world's greatest.
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