Your Family.

Weekend flies. 

That is about as much I would like to write about weekends. They are fast, they are usually late, and they are always gone by the time I realize what just happened. 

Monday mornings are not usually my best time of the week. I am more disheveled than I am on any other day of the week- except maybe Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday. 

I had an entrance test this Monday. I was petrified, disgusted, and "disheveled". I sat in my room, trying to breathe, deeply in, deeply out, as the numerous yoga lessons have taught me to. That is when I heard my dad speaking English with someone on the phone. 

It was remnants of the language- broken, out of tense, and "disheveled".

It could have been any other emotion that could have set off the tears but, I think it is the emotion of extreme proud that brought them down. 

All that weekend, I was trying to get my autobiographical statement ready for my application form. I had to write about the 24 years I had lived, studied, failed, won, laughed, cried. I had to write about what social and economic background I had come from. I had to write about my family background. 

Everything that I had to write in my application happened in front of me... on a Monday morning. 

-source

My parents are not the alumni of the best schools or best colleges. They do not belong the "hip" crowd. They speak broken English and they are the regular "middle class" people. 

But, they are the ones who sent their children to the best schools and then to the best colleges so their children don't lose out on belonging to the "hip" crowd.

They are the ones who have sacrificed their little happiness to get us what we "wanted" the most. 

They are the ones who spend without qualms on our clothes, books, hobbies... they will never have anything for themselves. 

They are the ones who work the same job for twenty-six years because they have to provide for a family.

They are the ones who scold, yell, and then display an act of compassion beyond comprehension. 

They are the ones who sit through the nights, taking turns while their children have the poxes, jaundice, and mumps. 

They are the ones who get hurt easily.

They are the ones who continue to work hard even when they hit their fifties. 

They are the ones who will speak broken second language, who will wear pants with the wrong shirts, who will laugh like children at the stupidest of jokes, and who will probably never know how darn proud their children are of them. 

Every family has their story- a set of parents who are wild, weird, trying, tumbling, then rising again. A set of parents who worry about the hike in the vegetable prices, laugh about their children's adventures. A set of parents who never spoke about their "big dream". 

And, I realized that all of this, everything that you have known about your parents, everything you have learned from them, all of that will only remain a part of you. It will probably get reflected in our parenting- when we tell our children not to worry about their sudden excursion from the school, or when we ask them to sit through the dinner, chewing exactly 32 times. 

All this cannot be written in a hundred words, or in six lines, or even in one page. 

But, it will always be written in us... 

Tell us what you love about your family.