A time in my life that taught me an important lesson about life was when I had to take care of the house and my little brothers after school. This happened when my mom went back to work after my dad got sent away for a year. It is a time in my life when I learned responsibility, understanding, and patience.
I had always been used to having my mom home when I got there since I started middle school. I never really had to worry too much about taking care of anybody but myself or getting chores done before she went back to work, but after she went back I came home to an empty house every day and had a lot more to do than just homework and playing around. I had to wash dishes, dust, sweep, vacuum, do the laundry, and cook dinner; all the things that my mom had done which I had always taken for granted. It was a shock to me how much actually had to be done just to keep the house going and still looking nice. I learned to do everything very well and I did the work on a schedule so that I didn’t get overwhelmed by it.
The other part of the work, taking care of my brothers, wasn’t quite as easy. They don’t get along well and we all fight and argue a lot. It was very hard to make sure that they did their homework, took their medicine, helped out cleaning or whatever other chores they were supposed to be doing. This was all harder than it should have been because the older of my two younger brothers saw himself as my equal and didn’t have much respect for me or do what I ask without a fight. He would daily refuse to help, fight with me when I tried to get his attention, and showed a complete lack of respect towards me at the simplest comment. At first I was angry with but and wanted to hurt him, in more ways than one, but after a while talking to my mom I realized that the problem was that he was trying to ignore the fact that things had changed because he still wanted our mom there to take care of him and that he needed help getting by with it. I gradually talked to him about it and eventually he came around and started picking up the slack with his work, although he still fought with me about it.
I learned responsibility from this experience; that I couldn’t just do what I wanted, but I also had to do the things that needed done. I also learned to understand people better, that while some people can adapt to change and help out to make things easier, some can not and try to ignore the change and act like everything is still the same. The final thing I learned was patience, something that I had lacked and that I use everyday to get by without starting a fight or losing my temper in another way.