Those Winter Sundays and the never retiring parents

I rarely ever did not attend school.  It was always fun to go to school, learn something new, spend time with classmates.  (Of course, there were a chunk of teenage years when I had one huge additional reason to look forward to school!)

But, there were those days when I had to skip school because of health issues.  If not the fever, then it was stomach pain.  It was only as a graduate student in the US did I learn that the stomach pain that had bothered me throughout was nothing but acidity, which was also a major reason for my drifting towards a less-spicy/bland food.

Anyway, it was one of those occasions when I had no choice but to stay back home.  I must have been about nine or so years old.

As the day progressed and I felt better, I remember asking my mother, as she was putting away the clean clothes, if she thought it was unfair that we children and father had weekend schedules that were different from our weekday routines, but to her everyday was all the same.

The strangest thing is that mother didn't think there was anything odd in this.  She felt that she was doing what she had to do, and she had no complaints about it.  Even now I think it is rather bizarre that mother didn't think it was unfair!

Thus, all my life the image of my mother has been of one who takes care of business in her quiet and un-complaining way.  But, as she and father are getting older, there are days when either by herself, or under father's strong suggestions, mother takes breaks and gets food from outside for the two of them.  While my logical brain thinks that is exactly what they ought to do, and it is also something I have been urging them to do a lot more, the mind struggles sometimes to reconcile the old image with the new reality.

As we get older, we notice that our children too carry with them images of their parents and homes, and  are sometimes pleasantly surprised, or shocked, when parents and homes aren't like how they remembered or even preferred.  I suppose all children, at any age, go through this process of re-adjusting their images of parents as the parents get older.

A lovely poem, at my favorite site for poetry, refers to the "father," who could also be a metaphorical person representing the parents, grandparents, to whom it didn't matter whether it was a weekday or weekend and they got up as always and had things going before I even woke up.  As children, we tend to assume that is what "they" had to do, and rarely ever do we pause to appreciate what they did.

My much delayed thanks to all of them.

Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early 
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, 
then with cracked hands that ached 
from labor in the weekday weather made 
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. 

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. 
When the rooms were warm, he'd call, 
and slowly I would rise and dress, 
fearing the chronic angers of that house, 

Speaking indifferently to him, 
who had driven out the cold 
and polished my good shoes as well. 
What did I know, what did I know 
of love's austere and lonely offices?