A Parent's Touch

My mother and father have been happily married for over twenty-five years, and are both active influences in my brothers and sister lives. They both raised us, but they both had different, but some similar roles when it came to trying us to teach us.

Some things that our parents are have tried to teach us have been to be affectionate towards others and to ourselves and, to always be wary of the friends we make, and to always try our hardest to accomplish our goals, but the way they went about it was a lot different.

Being affectionate towards others, and to ourselves is something that our parents tried to instill in there children. My mother always pressed it on us a little harder then my father did. She seemed to have a problem with us beating ourselves up if we failed at an attempted goal, so she tried to explain to us that it's ok to not always be the best at everything we do, and that other people won't always be good at the things that they do as well, and that we should take that into account, and shouldn't come down hard on someone else just because they aren't as good at something as us or even sometimes better at something then us.

My father on the other hand was a lot less affectionate with just about everything that came out of his mouth, and even his actions. If me and my brothers failed a goal he wouldn't be the one to stop us from feeling terrible about it, which hardened us to the harsh reality of life, and showed us that thing's don't always turn out the way that you want them to even though you might have tried hard at it. He also always thought if someone outside our family had failed at something, that it was always solely that persons fault and that the blame couldn't be placed on anyone else but themselves. Even our close friends were subject to his thinking.

Friendship is something that everyone in my family except my sister and mother truly cherishes, due to the way our parents taught us before we went off to kindergarten. My brothers and I were all taught that in school we would meet people different than us, and that we should never think they are weird, but to embrace them and become friends.

My mother is very friendly, but thinks that having to many friends is a bad thing, and doesn't show to much interest in our friends, and shows it by barely ever trying to remember any of our closest friends names or even what they have done for us. She thinks that we should have peers, but shouldn't be so close to them because that's all friends will ever be is just friends. That our relationships with our companions will never grow into something stronger then that, but over the years we have found that she was wrong, and that some of our ties with our friends have become very powerful, and they feel like family members.

My father on the other hand, even though he wasn't a very affectionate talkative person always showed interest in meeting our friends, one so he could see how they were like, and two to see how different they are from his own children. My father always remembered our friend's names and the random facts about them that my brothers and I would splurge out at the dinner table every night. Though my father liked the idea of us having friends, he always seemed to try and have a close eye on us and our friends to make sure that they were always a positive influence in our lives, and if he thought otherwise would always try and intervene, by trying to shorten the time that could be spent with that particular friend where we would be unsupervised by adults, and even though we hated it we found in some situations and friendships it was true that our friends didn't always have the best intentions for us, and unfortunately even though he tried so hard to teach us that. It was something that we would have to realize for ourselves, and something that couldn't be taught to us, but now we realize some of those friendships that he had jeopardized were only for