When I was younger one of the main messages that my parents taught me was to work hard. They made sure that I knew not everything came so easy and once I grew up I would have to work to attain things. I never really thought much about it as a kid, I just did what I was told. Occasionally. But as I got older this message became more and more realistic and it was starting to make sense to me. I no longer got free spending money to buy a lollipop at the store, I started having to do more chores around the house, and then at some point I got a job so I could really earn to save up and buy things. But, it still wasn’t quite like the real world, Mum and Dad probably did most of the housework which is understandable seeing as I still didn’t know how to operate the washing machine. One day we were out for dinner at a friend’s house, mum was feeling tired but she insisted that we still went. Mum has “moderate” food intolerances but later we found out that it was a lot more than “moderate”, she fainted at the sink in the bathroom and knocked herself out on the metal handles before plunging into the wall. As I was sitting on the couch being antisocial I was the only one that heard it happen so I called to dad to check on her, he did and he brought her out fairly unconscious with blood down her face (at the time it was quite frantic but now we laugh back at it), the ambulance was called and she got taken away to get stitches in her forehead. When she came back home she wasn’t quite as capable because she suffered a severe concussion. She couldn’t do much throughout her days of recovery which meant that she couldn’t really help out around the house and because Dad usually works late at the workshop this left me and my sister to run the house. We were cooking dinner basically every night if dad wasn’t home, doing the dishes, firewood, rubbish, and I found out what the big turny knob on the washing machine did. We did do this before but now we were taking on mums shift from what she would normally do if she was home when we weren’t. The messages that I got out of this experience and am now passing on is that you shouldn’t take what your family members do for granted and that you need to work hard even if you aren’t earning anything out of it.