I’m 20 today but maybe I could have been 30.

My parents had me 14 years after they got married. Not that they tried to have my brother and me for so long, but I often think about what my life would be if they had had us 4 years after they got married or maybe even 10. Anything less than 14. I wonder if maybe they would have been stricter or more lenient, if they would have been less worried for us, if maybe we would have got along better or my father would have retired by now. Was he a funnier guy in 1991? Was my mother less spiritual?
It’s funny to think about the things that have made the 2001 version of me today. All the big and little things that have shaped my thoughts and behaviour. The ways my parents let me do certain things and didn’t let me do other things. How they gave me certain things but decided together that it would be in my best interest to not give me other things. How even though they stood for the same things, they both have completely different ways of expressing what they want for me. My father likes to give me instructions and have me carry them out the way he runs his company that’s provided for me all my life, and my mother explains why I should do what she believes is good. Neither is better than the other, they’re just different. Perhaps my father didn’t have the time to explain but my mother did, but when my father does sit down with me, he teaches me things that know I’ll never be able to hear from anyone else. They made sure I was brought up well-travelled with culture and sport, they didn’t give me a phone until they absolutely needed to and always made sure I knew I could do better than I was doing.
I started writing this because I wanted to tell you about how there are a lot of tiny things that my parents did, most of which I don’t remember, that come back to me now but I realise did me a lot of good, one of which we called “Monday Treat.” We had a canteen in school that was undoubtedly a kid’s favourite place to be, but my mother noticed that we were asking her for too many unhealthy treats far too often. So she told us that we needed to cut it down and came up with the concept of our Monday Treat. I can’t say why it was on a Monday, but we each got a budget of 20 Rupees to spend after school on a Monday afternoon to buy anything we wanted at the canteen, and in 2007 I guarantee you there was no greater joy, those 20 bucks could have bought me the world. Eventually, that 20 became 30, 40 and you know how inflation goes.
I could go on about how they stood right in front every time I won anything or how they take it harder than me whenever I don’t get what they think I deserve, but it’s weird to think that these people wanted me to exist in the world and did/do everything in their power to keep me happy. I keep talking about the little things because they’re the things I want to keep reminding myself of. Somehow these are the people that we spend less and less time with because we decide that we’ve got better things to do. Not that we don’t, it’s just another one of those funny things.