Aung Aye (Yangon University) - Understanding and inspiring life stories

Understanding

When I was a child, I experienced a kind of understanding between my mother and father. If you ask me who works harder, my mother or father, I will always say that my mother works harder. This is because both my mother and father go out to work, but my mother also does the housework, such as cooking breakfast, dinner, and washing and ironing the family's clothes.

My mother wakes up at 5am before my father and my siblings wake up. She prepares breakfast, prepares lunch for my father and my sister who are going to work, and lunches for my two siblings who are going to school. After preparing the lunch boxes, she prepares breakfast on the table and wakes my father and my two siblings up. While we are taking a shower, my mother also takes a shower. After we all take a shower, we eat breakfast together. After breakfast, my father and mother take the lunch boxes that my mother has prepared, and my father and mother go to work, while my brother and I go to school.

Usually, my brother and I come home at three in the evening. When we get home, my two siblings do their homework. My father and mother come home at four thirty in the evening. While my father is reading, my mother goes into the kitchen. She cooks dinner. By the time my mother finishes cooking dinner, my two siblings have finished their homework from school, and my father has finished his reading. We all take a shower and eat dinner together.

After dinner, the whole family sat in the living room and watched TV. My father and my siblings were watching TV quietly, but my mother was ironing. When my mother took a shower in the morning, she washed and hung out the clothes we had taken off the day before. In the evening, it was already dry, so she watched TV and ironed the clothes. In fact, my mother was using her time productively.

One morning, the toaster oven that my mother had made for breakfast broke down. My father, I, and my brother were sitting at the breakfast table, but my mother had not arrived. My mother was late coming out of the bathroom because she had a few clothes to wash. She was just getting changed.

I was eating the toasted bread my mother had prepared for breakfast, so I stopped eating it and took a sip of milk to drown out the bitter taste of the toasted bread on my tongue. When I looked at my brother, he didn't seem to notice the bitter taste of the toasted bread he was digging into, but as usual, he was eating it with a piece of cheese and a little bit of butter, and drinking a little milk. This is my brother's habit. He is a person who eats food with pleasure, without worrying about the taste of any food.

In this house, only my father and I have taste. My father always tells me when something tastes bad. He also criticizes my mother. So I wondered what my father would say now. My father said nothing and calmly ate the toasted bread. But he seemed to notice the bitter taste. I noticed that he was eating a lot of cheese sauce. So I told my father.

“Dad... Mom's toast is still hot. Dad can eat it, but I can't.” So Dad smiled and replied.

"Eat as much as you can, daughter. The one who works the hardest in this house is your mother. A busy person can sometimes be a failure. You have to understand. Even my father used to think like that and always criticized my mother's cooking when she was bad. Then, when I realized that my mother was very busy, I corrected my father's behavior. Now, just eat more cheese and scallions, daughter. It's not so bitter anymore."

I was so happy with my father's words. I thought he loved my mother and recognized my hard work. So I ate the toasted bread with gusto. I also decided to help my mother with her chores as much as I could.