Day 3: Your parents

Dear mum and dad,

I'm going to start this off with a thank you. Thank you for being the greatest, most supporting, chill and loving parents one could ever ask for. There has never been anything that I wanted to do (even the obviously detrimental shit) that you guys didn't support or encourage me in. In all honesty, I feel like I really took that for granted in my younger days. I never really realized the importance of having loving parents until I got older and started working with youth and looked at myself like "Damn, Illa, you're not that bad".

Sometimes when I was younger, I would wake up to you guys fighting, and (spare me, I was young) I would pray for you guys to get a divorce. I would pray for one of you to get fed up enough with the others bullshit and just leave, hopefully without dropping bombs and putting us in the middle. It never occurred to me how much you guys love each other. Despite everything, you guys were still together for over 2 decades. That's admirable. I admire it.

Having you as parents taught me that for things to pan out in love and relationships, you must put your pride aside (I've yet to master it, but I have indeed grasped it.). That's the only way it'll ever work. And that's the only way you'll know that person is the one for you. At times I feel like no matter what I do in any relationship, I will never measure up to yours, and I'm perfectly fine with it, because if anybody knows hardship and work it's you guys, but I can only hope I do as good a job raising my children and being a significant other as you did.

I owe you forever and then some and would give you my left lung, thank you for keeping my head above water in times when I didn't want to wake up the next morning.

Much love,
illa.