To you immature, thankless souls who demand everything but appreciate nothing; you who truly believe that you are owed; who are a drain on the people who care for you. To the eternal victims; the users, the narcissists, you who take without giving back. To all of you who habitually turn up with your hand out but disappear when the shoe is on the other foot. Thank you, for teaching us so much.
We invited you into our lives because we didn’t know any better at the time. When you needed us, we were there for you, and no matter the cost to ourselves, we helped you. We sacrificed our own well-being, and that of our family, to make sure you didn’t go without, and at every turn, we learned to be better.
We gave you a place to live and you trashed it, then you expected us to either live in chaos or clean up after you. This taught us to be more mindful of our spaces and possessions. We provided you with electricity and you expressed your gratitude by leaving on every light, appliance, fan, heater, computer, television, and game console in the house, whether you were using it or not, which edified for us, the necessity for energy conservation. We made certain that you had running water and to repay us you took hour-long showers every day and were constantly and unnecessarily doing laundry because instead of putting things away properly, you threw them on your floor. Doing this taught us to be economic with our water and time usage and to respect our property. We planned everyone’s meals a week in advance, we purchased all the groceries we needed, we brought them home, we put them away, and two days later half of them had disappeared along with most of our dishes, so we learned to make due with less. We cooked healthy meals for an army and invited you to join us at our table day after day. When the meal was done, leftovers were carefully stored, dishes were washed, and the kitchen was tidied, not that you ever helped, but that demonstrated to us, the value of teamwork. The next day, when we opened our refrigerator to grab milk for our breakfast cereal or leftovers for our lunches, they weren’t there, but that gave us the skills to adapt to unexpected changes. We supplied you with highspeed internet because you “needed it for work”, and you consumed so much of our bandwidth, with your gaming and streaming, that we couldn’t even check our email most days, but in those moments, we learned to unplug and spend more time together as a family. We let you use our satellite television because everyone needs downtime, and we were repaid with excessive pay-per-view charges and a DVR full of ridiculous programs, which gave us a healthier respect for quality media and improved our ability to budget money. We let you have a pet; it was obnoxious, not housetrained, and you neglected it constantly, but that taught us what our own pets are truly worth and showed us how to be responsible and loving with them. You slept all day and were awake all night; again, we became more efficient at time management, but also you imparted in us the skills to be quiet and infused us with newfound patience. You overheard our conversations and you shared distorted versions of them with other people. This experience trained us to always be mindful of our surroundings and company, when sharing our private thoughts. You spent most of your money on your two-pack-a-day habit and cartloads of energy drinks, sodas, and junk food, all the while schooling us on the dangers of addiction. You wasted every other spare dime on video games, Netflix, new toys, and eating out, whilst revealing to us what frivolity really looks like. When you touted your accomplishments and nifty new gadgets, you were really signifying to us, the importance of humility. When your trendy trinkets laid abandoned in every corner of your room, after only one or two uses, we saw the cost of being fickle. Your child came to stay with us for a while and, like your pet, he was ill-behaved and messy, yet you often ignored him. So, we treated him like one of our own and by the end of his vacation, he acted like one of our own as well. This reminded us that children should never be held responsible for their parents and should always be afforded the care that they desperately need and truly deserve. When you frequently grumbled about how badly you were screwed over, how terribly you were treated, and how much better you deserved, it hammered home the value of checking sources and remembering that every story has two sides. It also alerted us to the possibility that others would hear similar exaggerated stories about us. Every day that you were with us provided us with further information, added experience, and expanded our wisdom. It boosted our awareness and helped us stay woke. We learned broader lessons of living our lives with grace, patience, understanding, and tolerance. Having you in our lives amplified our need to be cautious with our trust, while giving people the benefit of the doubt.
Thank you, for providing our family with a living cautionary tale from which to learn. You gave us a brilliant, in-person example of how not to be. We don’t expect you to understand because we know you do not possess the tools necessary to do so, but we are indebted to you, truly, for facilitating our growth and evolution. We genuinely hope that someday someone will gift you with the experience that you so graciously bestowed upon us so that you too will have the opportunity to learn each of these priceless lessons. Then perhaps, you will learn to be just as grateful as we are.
Best Wishes,
Your Eternally Grateful Friends
