Mom and dad
Hey everyone, I hope you are all doing well. The past month has been a very busy month for me. I made a lot of changes in my life, some small, some pretty significant. For me I was just running in place, things were fine, but for me, fine wasn’t good enough. I won’t go into it too deeply (that’ll be for another day) but what I will say is that change is necessary, it's not easy, and it's completely worth it. As for today, I wanted to talk about probably the most important lesson my parents have ever taught me and my brother.
Growing up my brother and I had the best role models, our parents. My mom worked as a school teacher and my dad worked in New York City. Mom was and still is the nurturer and dad was and is always putting out fires and getting us to where we need to go. Even today at 27 years old and 1000 miles away they are still teaching me and helping me along through life. It took me a while to actually see what my parents do and have done for my brother and me, but once I did everything kind of clicked. This brings us back to the most important life lesson they taught us, take care of others no matter what. Growing up mom would watch our friends after school because their parents worked and my mom didn't want the kids to go to the after school program. So a typical day in the Winter household growing up consisted of my mom taking me, my brother, and usually 3-4 of our friends back to the house. My mom would then sit us all down and have us do our homework (Which I never did) and while we were doing our homework mom would be in the kitchen essentially making everybody lunch or snacks and everything was healthy or homemade. We couldn’t leave the table until all the homework was done, once we finished the world was ours we could do whatever we wanted after that. Mom would usually play outside with us or hang out and take a 5 min break before she needed to get up and help one of us with something. When all this was going on I just thought my mom was the cool mom, but it was more than that. She was helping people, not because she had to but because she wanted to and to this day my mom is changing the lives of so many people. Now my dad taught me the same lesson, just in a completely different way.
Growing up my dad traveled a bunch, he would find himself all across the globe. He made his way through Europe and even as far as Thailand and Australia. My brother and I loved it when he was traveling because we knew he was going to bring us back something really cool (my dad always knew how to find the best stuff.) Now I'm not going to sit here and say it was great all the time, it was tricky sometimes when he was traveling, but my dad has this talent where despite all his traveling he never missed a milestone moment. He would travel all day and night to get home, he would switch flights, hop trains and do whatever he needed to do to get home. With that being said there is one story that comes to mind that not only made me so happy in the moment but it showed me what it means to be a dad and what it means to put others before yourself. I was in the 8th grade and I had a playoff basketball game and dad was halfway across the globe and was probably going to miss the game, or so I thought. Long story short, midway through the first quarter I see my dad calmly walk into the gym and sit next to my mom. I honestly think my mom didn't even expect him to show up. Now some of you might say oh that's what it means to be a parent and you’d be right, but it's an even bigger lesson. He could have just come to the next game but he didn't. He did something for somebody else because he wanted to be there.
To this day, my parents are my biggest heroes and they still are moving mountains for other people every chance they get. It’s been so fun to watch both of them just really do what they love and enjoy the life they built for our family. I’m blessed to have learned all I have from them and all the things they still have left to teach me.