A Child Does Not Have To Be The Best, But Happy

Adrian is a child of the 21st century. He has two parents who work a lot. According to him, they work “an incredible number of hours every day” to pay for the house they live in, the cars they drive and the few days of vacation they take each year. He also says that it did not matter to have a smaller room, or a car that was a little slower and did not have leather seats, a future that was less secure in exchange for a little more time with his parents. He does not have to be the best. What he needs is to be happy.

But not the parents he has now – tired, stressed, worried and unreachable – but rather with his parents as they were before – attentive, approachable, smiling, caring and consistent. He misses them but he has no idea how to tell them this. Adrian has also seen that adults, not just his parents, no longer express how they feel. He suspects that there is a connection between the emotional world and words, but that no one has really taught him how this works. These are suspicions that make him feel insecure.

Adrian is a worried child

Adrian is also a child who does not play. Or rather, he is not just playing with the purpose of having fun for a while. Since the birth of his sister, his parents considered him old enough to delegate responsibilities to him, even though he was too young for the kind of anxiety this caused. The only thing this gives him is more uncertainty, but he does not know how to express this to them.

The little protagonist in this article has no free time during the day. The question of what he would like to do is limited to the weekends when he is lucky and his mother works. These are the weekends he spends with his grandparents. For two days, they try to compensate him for all the freedom that his parents have taken away from him for the rest of the week. Even if he does not say anything, they have understood how he feels.

Adrian does not like football, but he no longer protests. At least not directly, because he does not know how to do this as an adult and he does not want to do it as a child but above all he does not want to disappoint his father. He already feels that he is doing this when he is not playing well or when it is his turn to sit on the bench. He does not even imagine how he would have felt if he had told his father that he had other dreams.

Adrian is a child who has been silenced

But Adrian loves to read. He remembers the stories his father used to tell him when he was little. Some he read, others he invented. Adrian especially liked the ones he invented because his father knew him so well that he knew exactly what his son would like and he therefore fell asleep with a smile on his face.

It was a special evening when his father added something new, because the next day Adrian used to do something in secret that we can now tell about. He used to write them down on paper because he wanted to share them with his best friend. It was his way of trying to compensate for the sadness he saw in his friend’s eyes who had never gotten to know his own father. He also had another motive. One of his neighbors had Alzheimer’s and Adrian had witnessed the memory loss.

He did not want to forget the stories he had now heard, and he could feel how his childhood disappeared a little at a time and that they would not return.

Adrian knows more languages ​​than most children his age, he can play the piano, he can handle equations while his friends still do not understand what a negative number is and he knows how to take care of his younger sisters. Adrian is also a very sad child and is aware of that fact, for one day he was happy, extremely happy. A happiness that his parents had sacrificed for a future that may not come. Is it really worth it?