Journey to My Father's Past

Going through life my dad would like to stress in certain moments of life how good I had it; the good old “when I was your age” commentary. Like many other children, I would be thinking, there he goes again. I never really took time to sit down with my parents and find out about what life was like at their age, maybe because I didn’t have the time or because I wasn’t interested, or simply because I thought that they would compare their lives to mine. It wasn’t just that things are different from country to country, but times had drastically changed and like most of my peers I really don’t think our parents can relate to what we go through.
Despite all of this, it was interesting to step into another world with my father. He remembers everything like it was yesterday, and could still give good descriptions about his young years. He talked about how in Pakistan, school was a lot tougher than it was here and that at the age of eighteen he knew that he wanted to be an engineer and was already in his second year of third year of college. School systems overseas seem to be set according to the British school system, something that was beyond my comprehension. He talked about how weird it was having a two year old sister at the age of eighteen, and about his responsibilities as a big brother to six other siblings. I asked him if he was as uptight then as he is now, and he told me a story about how him and his friend had skipped a day of school and went on a trip to a town three hours away from the school on a motorcycle. He told me about the stuff him and his friend did, and how my grandma hadn’t even gotten wind of what had happened. My dad, who is nearly bald, talked about when he used to spent hours doing his hair in front of the mirror.
I think my dad was excited to tell me about his young days. When I had asked him, he asked me what it was for, when I told him it was for school I think I caught a flash of disappointment. I believe he thought that his baby girl was interested about his life for once. But after about two minutes of the conversation, I was genuinely interested in his life. It seemed so distant, but so amazing. He told me that when he was young, a person would enjoy the simple pleasures of life, but now everything is going so fast that either people don’t take the time to stop and realize them or if you do stop than you have lose something in your career. My dad came alive during our conversation. It was nice to have just me and him sitting on a couch together, enjoying a cup of tea, and it was nice to see him so happy. I realized how much my time means to my dad. He really enjoyed it and I heard great stuff about his youthful years.
Although, I have moments where I believe that it’s okay for me to not know things about my family, because I hear about them all the time, I think that it’s really important for the future generation to know where their family came from and what life was all about. Sometimes we get so caught up that we forget to realize the details of someone’s life, especially someone you care about, but those moments, those stories, make them who they are and that effects everyone that comes in contact with them.
I’m called the irresponsible child of the house. Every time I do something wrong, which happens often, I have to hear about it from my parents, and every time it feels like they don’t know what I am going through, almost as if they were never my age. Doing the transcript exercise made my father not just seem like the father that I had grown up knowing. The funny, caring, opinionated, authoritative, and rigid man was like me. I love him so much, and probably the more because I know that he has made mistakes, because he too was a child once, because he too is not always right, because he is always there when you need, because he is the rock of my life.