my family
our family - our parents and siblings - are the very first people to contribute something to our life. our parents gave us our lives, nurtured us from the start, taught us to become God-fearing, law-abiding citizens, respectful people, and become independent, without the expectation of a payback. my mother once said that we pay them back by being good people and nurturing our future families. and then there are our siblings - well some of them are there to torture us and others are there to just plain be pesky and annoying. but we love them all, including their little faults.
my parents made sure we have our feet firmly on the ground. we were taught humility, respect, courtesy, industry, honesty and they instilled in me and my siblings the importance of education. having had very little education themselves (my father didn't finish grade 6 due to poverty and my mother didn't finish grade 4 due to poverty and the second world war) it was important to them that we value education and made us realize how lucky we are that we can go to school. when we so much as veered towards laziness with our studies we are told of the hardship and the prejudice they experienced because they were considered illiterates.
illiterates they weren't. my mother taught us to read and write in english by the time we reached the age of four (except for our youngest who was considered 'retarded' at the time but the tradition of teaching him still started at four, just that the success didn't come till three years later than usual). she could read and write english and can carry on good conversation when forced to. my father built radios and stereos from scratch, and even built my mother a television made of recycled parts from different brands, as well as a refrigerator, the motor of which he painstakingly re-wired, all from just reading manuals and magazine how-to's.
my older brother and i had this sibling rivalry because my father favoured him (he's the first born and a boy, why not?), so i had to better him in every aspect of our young lives (i won all the time, of course :-) i think that's how my competitive spirit got honed!). and of course, being the oldest girl, i had to be a role model (hahaha!) to my three younger sisters (yaiks!) and, after my mother died, became the mother figure to our younger siblings.
we all grew up with different values from just one set of parents. we faced poverty by ourselves sans help from relatives, and we are very proud of that. in fact, we had a late aunt who introduced us to her husband (when they visited canada several years ago) as "my successful nieces and nephews who never asked even for one cent from us"; her husband having met some of our relatives, couldn't believe that we were more closely related to her than the other relatives who were always asking for help and handouts.
so i am grateful and thankful for my family and if i were to live my life again, i hope they'd be my family again, then i know how to exact revenge on... oooops, no, sorry, i strayed there for a while... kidding aside, they are my favourite family in the whole wide world even though they piss me off a lot of the time.
-o0o-
this is the 'thankful 4 november' challenge. if you wish to join this challenge, read the details here:
http://365project.org/discuss/themes-competitions/14769/november-thankful-4-challenge
@lesip - thank you, leslie.