Enlight 21

Naivete

Author: Jake Kim | Category: Reflections | Date: 07-24-2020

Regardless of intellect or talent, everyone has had misconceptions as a child. It’s a natural process for children to perceive or conceive things in naive ways due to their lack of understanding and experience. Out of the many things that I have misconceived during my childhood, the most remarkable misconception was my parents’ hard work.
As a pastor’s child, my family and I always had to live a bit of a frugal lifestyle. We were never short on dough, but we had to be conscious of our financial decisions. My parents still bought me and my brother presents and delicacies, but they were never extremely expensive. Besides financial awareness, there wasn’t anything that distinguished my lifestyle from that of my friends.
But as a child, I thought we were rich. When I asked my parents to buy me something out of the blue, which, obviously got rejected almost every time, I just assumed it was because my parents were just being strict and bad. And this wasn’t a wrong assumption, as they hated the idea of spoiling their children. But, there probably was an underlying financial burden in my requests as well.
During the third grade, when my dad was walking me to school, I asked him, “Dad, are we rich?” He told me that we were part of the middle class, which I didn’t understand, so I just assumed that we were rich.
Later, as a fifth-grader, most of my friends had birthday parties at trampoline parks and other places that were designated for parties, which gave me the idea of having a birthday party of my own. Since I was turning 10, I thought I deserved it, as having a two-digit age was mind-boggling to me. So, with my mom’s hard-earned money, I had the best birthday of my life, without a worry in the world. It was at a trampoline park, with plenty of pizza and goodies for everyone to enjoy. I got tons of presents from my friends and tons of gift cards, so I assumed that the gift cards were enough to reimburse the cost of the birthday party.
Looking back, I felt sorry for putting that kind of burden on my mom. Not only did it eat away my mom’s hard-earned money, but it also put my mom through the hassle of having to organize the entire thing. I felt guilty that I was blinded by the excitement to notice my mom’s efforts to make my birthday as enjoyable as it was.
Now I try my best to appreciate my parent’s hard work and repay them by helping them out with any troublesome work to the best of my abilities. There’s still much that I don’t know about my parents’ efforts and what it’s like to be an adult in general, but I’ve grown enough to understand and appreciate my parents for the things they do for me.