I used to think all children learned life the same way I did.
Quietly.
By watching.
By figuring things out alone.
As the eldest daughter in the family, I somehow inherited responsibilities before I even understood what responsibility truly meant. My grandparents were my main caregivers growing up, and if I’m being honest, I felt closer to them than I did to my own parents.
My parents’ generation carried survival differently.
To them, love often looked like providing.
Working.
Paying bills.
Keeping food on the table.
Emotional nurturing wasn’t something openly talked about back then. At least not in my world.
So I learned life by observing.
I learned how to wash dishes by watching adults do it enough times.
I learned how to boil water, fry eggs, iron my school uniform, and even sew simply because eventually… somebody had to do it.
Nobody really sat me down and taught me.
I genuinely thought that was normal.
I thought all children quietly stood at the corner of rooms collecting life skills through observation alone.
And maybe that’s why I became such a visual and hands-on learner. I watched carefully. I adapted quickly. I figured things out.
Children do that.
They adapt so well that sometimes they don’t even realise they’re surviving.
Of course, childhood wasn’t all sadness either.
Some of my favourite memories were the simplest ones.
Playing outside after school until the streetlights came on.
Running around without phones tracking our every movement.
Drinking water from random bottles our friends passed around like we were somehow immune to germs.
Life felt smaller then.
Lighter too.
But home itself often felt emotionally confusing.
Most of the time, I barely saw my parents. And when I did, it was usually during moments of tension — fighting, stress, scolding, exhaustion. As a child, I didn’t understand any of it.
I just understood how it made me feel.
Looking back now, I think I became a “difficult” child because I was trying to be seen.
Children don’t always know how to ask for love properly.
Sometimes they ask through anger.
Through rebellion.
Through silence.
Through acting out.
At 12 years old, when my parents eventually separated, I remember quietly deciding that love probably wasn’t real anyway.
I told myself I would never get married.
Funny how life works sometimes.
Because years later, at 22, I did.
And now as a parent myself, I often think about how children normalize the environments they grow up in. We assume our childhood is “normal” simply because it is familiar.
Only later do we realise:
some children become independent too early not because they are ready… but because they have no choice.
Ummi Noi