Parents - Your ‘Best Friends forever’

Losing or parting from our best friends at any point of time is a matter of inexplicably unbearable pain for young girls and boys, right? Yes, but let me ask an important question: Who is your best friend?

If you ask the same question to anybody, of course, they suddenly will remember a long list of their sweet and beloved friends and reveal their names with extra details enthusiastically. Try to pose one more question: What do you mean by friendship? Oh My God..! They start to tell all the stuff they did with their friends. Surely, we all know the likes and dislikes of our friends and also we respect them.

But my question is, do we ever think of making friendship with our own parents. We are so busy with our friends that do not stay connected with our parents, even if we live with them under the same roof. Most of us portray parents as ‘Serious Dictators’ who just order us ’how to act and what to do?’ etc.

But that is not true my young friends. We have to change our assumption in this regard. Some of our youngsters at some point of time may feel that they have to cultivate a close friendship with somebody. They should realize that nobody can be a better friend than our parents, who may already have lost many of their ‘close friends’ in course of upbringing their children. If we shun close bond with our parents, loneliness will become a part of their life. Surely they will accept it as fate.

If we think how our parents were in their youth, we get a better chance to rebuilding and fostering a friendship, which we have lost in the course of growing up. How many of us know what is up with our parents, the same way that we know what is going on with our friends are up to? How they are feeling? What makes them happy, angry, annoyed or frustrated?

Unfortunately, we do not know our parents as much as we know our friends. Did we ever ask them what their friends were like? What was their house like?

We get frustrated if our parents intervene in our friendship matters. “Mom, u just keep quiet, you don’t know how to deal with my friends”. We often say like this to the same mother, who taught us how to talk, How to walk, and how to deal with the society? So quickly we forget the fact that our parents were our heroes a few years ago.

The situation has been changed now. We have grown up. We want nothing to do with our parents because we have nothing in common with them. How cruel we are, right?

But the truth is that we have more in common with them than anyone else. Our parents also share their feelings, experiences, secrets with us that no one else can. All we need to do is keep in touch with them and understand them. Once we do this, we will begin to see all the commonalities. Then we can see our parents in ourselves.

It is really nice to listen if someone recalls the experiences of childhood. It gives us a glimpse of the people - how they were before growing up and getting married and having kids. Imagine the same from our own parents: Truly, it is inexplicable pleasure to lie on the thigh of mother and to hear the stories of her past life.

When we give preference for our ‘personal life’ over relationship with our parents we should realize that they too had a personal life before our birth. But now we are their life!

We should talk to our parents more often; we should hang out with our parents once in a while and get to know them. We will find that this will not only give us a new perspective on their parenting, but it will instill a new found mutual respect in us for them and in them for us, and it will also create and strengthen a connection that should last a life time - that of friendship.

So, friends… Feel free to foster friendship with your parents, who can become your best friends for ever. If you failed to cultivate friendship with your parents, then you will fail in your life.