Missing the simple life

I miss the days when life was simple, when the hardest thing that I could do was to ask my Mom to take us out for dinner at Pizza Hut together… Those were the days… Life wasn’t as complicated as we know it to be. I remember my family taking the earliest flight to Salalah from our condo in Al Khuwair, Oman… It was amazing because we were just browsing through this magazine and we were interested to see a forest in the desert, so we immediately called up my dad and told him to get plane tickets, and we flew for Salalah the following day. I remember my mom driving like there’s no tomorrow and me and my brother hanging on for dear life, reminding my Mom the speed limit and to slow down, we were on our way to the beach that time… The night we slept on the beach after the bonfire and all that fun stuff… And also time when we would do handstands and fall on our backs on the carpeted floor, laughing…

We were kids… We were carefree; we knew nothing but to have fun. Smiles on our dirty faces, sand on our toes, and messy hair…  But I guess something that made us different from the rest of the kids we knew was that we were taught to be responsible at a very early age. Where would you see a 2nd grader cooking chicken nuggets for guests and helping his Mom make chicken salad, a 1st grader cleaning the carpet with a vacuum cleaner and asking his dad to buy a broom instead, and a toddler checking that small little hole on the door to see who’s knocking outside and memorizing all the countries of the world and their capitals? Yes, this is also fun for us. We find everything to be nice and exciting when we’re working together as a team, me and my dear younger brothers. Play together, work together! That was the idea. We felt like one entity rather than individuals. It was brilliant!

We would always fetch our Mom from her work. There’s this nice park beside the hospital where Mom worked and me and brothers would always play there until 5:30-ish when we would go to the hospital and see her fixing up her things and hug us as she leaves work behind. For every good deed we did together, we’d get a treat from our Mom. She always gave what we wanted: Dinner in a restaurant. The hardest thing that I could do was to ask my Mom to take us out for dinner at Pizza Hut. We always ate at KFC or at Burger King and we grew tired of it then! Those were the days. We were contented with what we had back then. Happy are the content, so the saying goes and will always be for us.

But now life’s gotten a lot more complicated. We’d save up for the things we wanted, we’d have to endure a lot of things we’ve never done before like commuting to UST everyday and live with my Dad’s terrible cooking, and experience the feeling of being separated from the very person who brought us into this world and taught us to be good boys. My Mom’s in Sacramento. I miss her a lot. I’m in college now and so is Maurice, Craig’s in high school. We’ve grown up to be good boys indeed, but with a bit of naughtiness on the side. I miss the days when we were so pampered, but never were we spoiled brats; the days when we would sit around the table and enjoy 2 huge family size pepperoni and Hawaiian pan pizzas; and also the days when we were taught how to cook and to clean, when everything was still simple and easier to understand because we never cared for anything else beyond the 4 cozy walls and carpeted floor of our home.

I miss being a kid... I miss days when my Mom taught us how to cook and to clean… I miss Mom!