It was not too long ago when my mom left me. She took my sister with her. We took her and my sister to the Cincinnati Airport, and Poof! Just like that, she was gone. Gone to India her birthplace, her mother country, her home and she left me here …

With my dad of course. She was only going to be gone for three months. She was on vacation!

I had the house to myself while my dad went to work the day after my mother left. I lazed around the house watchingTV eating junk food, and calling friends, I had to go to work at 12:30 so I boiled some eggs for breakfast. My mother had only been gone f0r about twelve hours and a potentially disastrous situation occurred. I had eaten one of the eggs when my friend Mohit came to the door to take me to work. I forgot to turn the burner off.

Around 5:00 my dad arrived to take me home from work. This was when disaster struck As soon as I opened the door, the wretched smell of burning was clearly present, and for some strange reason, it smelled like rotten eggs. As I walked into the kitchen, with my dad following behind me, I saw pieces of charmed eggshell all over the stove. On the burner, I saw the pot in which I had cooked the eggs. Suddenly I remembered what happened.

“Oh no, look at what I did. I left the burner on, and it smells horrendous! What a mess!” I shouted. “How could I be stupid!”

“Well Gaurav, I guess you have your work cut out for you, so get to it,” my dad proclaimed calmly, and he went over to the living room to watch TV, leaving me with all the dirty work. Oh please hurry up it smells in here, “he taunted.

My dad likes to tease me. I guess it’s his way of getting back at me for all the stupid things I keep doing, and having a little fun of course. I try to avoid my dad as much as I can, but he is my father, and I must do as he says.

“Yeah yeah, yeah,” The first step I took was to get rid of the awful smell. I bolted upstairs and turned on the fan that ran through the whole house. This was an enormous fan that sucked all the air out of the house and brought fresh air from outside in. Then I hopped down to the kitchen and swept the floor full of egg shells. The area was clean within the halfan hour, but that smell was still detectable. That would have to go with time.

“Gaurav come here. I need to talk to you. Your mother has just left and you nearly burned the house down on the very next day.You are going to have to learn to be responsible, and trustworthy.”

I thought was in trouble or something Since frequently I am. Once I had actually let a knife sup out the of my hand and it flew through the antique vase we had just bought a few days earlier. The vase was shattered to bits and my dad was so mad that I was not allowed to use the computer for the next few months! My father has quite a temper. I recall one time when woke him up for an emergency call from the hospital, and he jumped up and screamed at me Just for waking him up out of his afternoon nap.

“What did I do wrong? I’m just human. You can punish me for accidentally forgetting to shut the stove,” I pleaded.

“No, I will not punish you, but after today I am reluctant to say this. I’ve decided that since your mom in there I am going conveyor a permanent a key the house. Can I trust you?”

“Course you can” With that, he gave me the new key.

” Remember, your mother is not here for the next few months so what happened today should never happen again,” he reiterated.

He took me by surprise. My father usually does not do that.He is quite predictable.I guess I have been around him for so long can usually tell what he is thinking, but this time I was wrong.

I feel that I can predict my dad quite well simply because I have so much interaction with him. Many children do not see their parents as much as I do. My family is what some would call a near ideal family. It includes a dad, mom, brother, and sister, and we live happily ever after. Do not get me wrong here, we have a lot of family arguments, but we are better off than most. We live in a lovely white brick house that is fairly large. And, west down together for meals almost every day. What more could you ask for?

It’s a fact that family values are depreciating in not the only one country, but around the world. Just 50 years ago, a divorce was an enormous decision, yet lately, there are people that were getting divorced six, seven, eight, nine, an even ten times. I was watching Oprah and I saw a woman who had been divorced twenty-eight times. Her average length for a marriage was a few, months!

It is amazing how much the world has changed in the last hundred years. A hundred years ago, children were children and led the lives of children. Little stress, and few fears. Yet, today many of my friends lead the lives of adults. They come home, and no one is there. They are forced to learn responsibility at a very early age. Many of my friends do not have someone to call ‘dad’. One of my friends has been carried a wallet since he was 6 years old. Although it may seem insignificant, this put a lot of pressure on him because could just run out and play and have as much fun as he liked.

During the period of time while my mom was in India, not only did I feel what it was like to have one parent, I felt what it is like to be an only child. I learned a great deal of responsibility during my mother’s trip, and my dad felt that I was acting more like a mature adult. And, this was only a period of three months. I felt like a different person when my mother came back, more mature and able to my mother came back more mature and able to accept responsibility. Although other factors may have contributed, I feel that my mother’s absence forced me to learn responsibility.

This responsibility is a good thing. It can help someone through life with fewer troubles yet it should not be applied so heavily to young children. They are just growing up and need their childhood. Many times adults forget their children and expect their children to act as they did. Many parents also do not realize that times have changed for children. There are so many pressures such as drugs, school extra-curricular activities, and more. Trust me, my parents always give that little speech “When I was a kid ..” It really annoys me when they do that, I wish I could talk back. I could I’d say, “Excuse me, but I believe we have actually passed into 1996, Sorry, it is not 1 896 anymore.”

There are good sides to my mother going on a vacation too I gained a lot of freedom and learned a lot of responsibility. The freedom was good. In previous summers I was forced to study for many hours a day, yet now I free to do as I please. Also, realizing that my dad could be with me all day, we started an allowance system, which gave me financial freedom also.

I suppose I just missed my mom.