Owing our parents — a lot - The Princetonian

The first few weeks of school were warm for September, and as I sat in my furnace-like room I was reminded of the thousands of French citizens — predominantly the elderly — in homes without air-conditioning, who died in the heat wave this past summer. But to me, more striking than the deaths themselves was the report that a considerable number of families let their loved ones lie in fridges, like jars of pickles or slabs of pork, while they enjoyed the rest of their vacations. "Honey, Mom apparently died this morning, but why let that disrupt our fun, right? We'll deal with her when we get around to it. Okay, off to the beach!"

It's hard to imagine anyone I know displaying such heartless behavior, but then most people I know left home just a few years ago, have healthy parents and depend on them for tuition. In other words, our parents are still useful, more useful to us than we are to them. It won't always be that way. I already hear people bragging about how their parents have no input in their lives anymore, how they live entirely by themselves, for themselves. Their parents have become superfluous. Others admit they rarely call their parents and go home as seldom as possible because their parents increasingly become a hindrance to their own plans. Parents bring obligations, and obligations are annoying. The last time I checked, for the vast majority of my life I've made my parents' lives more difficult, more stressful, more hectic — and inconvenience is hardly an excuse to push them away.

There's a stigma, especially in places like Princeton, to saying you owe something to other people. We all want to be seen as completely self-made — we got where we are and became who we are purely on our own merit and efforts, thank you very much. But as much as we'd like to think of ourselves as living solely as individuals, this is simply untrue, and we are being unfair to others if we give them no credit for the influence they have had on us. My parents, who still mix up their pronouns and verb tenses, could never help with my homework growing up, but I'd be a stubborn, conceited child if I thought my academic achievements were solely my own doing.

Call me an old-fashioned girl with old-lady ideas if you want, but I find it more than reasonable to say that we all have a duty to respect our parents. For example, the statement, "My parents really didn't want me to go far away this summer so I found an internship in the area," to me, doesn't reveal that the speaker has some growing up to do, but that the speaker knows the value of compromising his own desires for the sake of those he loves. Taking our parents' wishes and opinions into consideration is not a sign that we are too weak to live without them, but rather an indication that although we don't need them like we used to, we have the maturity and respect to maintain their importance in our lives.

It is easy to become giddy with happiness upon leaving home, forgetting how integral that oft-suffocating nest has been to our development and identity. We proudly declare ourselves "Princeton in the nation's service" — but the nation is not alone in being our responsibility. Despite the fact that we are adults — or because of that fact — we need to acknowledge our parents, only the two most important people in our lives thus far. We owe them that much. Julie Park is a junior from Wayne, N.J.