Whenever I tell someone my parents' ages, they look at me like I'm a little girl who lost her parents at a young age.

Yup, my mom is 57, and my dad is 61.

Then, once I say that they're also disabled, the first response I get is, "I'm so sorry."

Thank you for the sentiment, but I promise I'm fine. Yes, some days things are harder than they might be if my parents were a bit younger, but that truly just makes me stronger!

However, I guess my life is still very different from my friends'.

I do my own laundry. Gosh, is it hard? Yes! But if I want clean clothes, that's just what I've gotta go through I guess.

I prepare my own meals on occasion. Seriously, this is one of the hardest things for me to get through. I guess it's lucky that I like to cook for my family. (Sometimes I even volunteer.)

My parents just don't understand what it's like to be a kid today. Seriously, this has to only happen for people with older parents. They were born so long ago.

Do you understand now? We're really not so different. But seriously, there are definitely some perks to having older parents.

I get to have two older sisters. They're much older than I am but still close enough in age to where they can give me advice. When things get hard, I look to their lives and see that they got through it, and I know that I can too. Also a huge plus: I get to have nieces and nephews that I love dearly that I've gotten to grow up with or watch grow up.

Speaking of family, mine is huge! It would be pretty big even if I had been born 20 years earlier, but from the day I was born, I had an incredibly huge support system that spanned multiple generations. I have SO MANY cousins. When I went to my last family reunion, I counted, and I had more family members there than students in my graduating class.

But as I've already mentioned, as similar as I am to others with normal-aged parents, there are definitely some differences that are somewhat less positive.

Even as a young child, there were a few things I couldn't do with my parents. They definitely did their best, but sometimes intense physical activity was just too difficult. Sometimes, my dad and I would take walks around our yard (this sounds more impressive if you understand how large the yard is).

Anyway, on occasion, we would have to stop on the hill because my dad's back hurt and he needed to take a break. Still, one day I told my dad while we were walking, "Daddy, my back hurts, can we sit down?" Clearly, the fact that my dad had to rest sometimes while we were walking didn't affect me because I seemed to believe I was going through the same things too.

When I was young, I didn't notice that my parents were different from other people's. Even as I grew older and it became more apparent, it didn't really affect me until my mom started to get sick.

One day in eighth grade, I got a call that really did change my life. My mom was in the hospital. She was going to be okay, and she was being well taken care of, but she was really sick. Soon after, she told me that she would have to be on oxygen and needed a lung transplant.

That was over five years ago. Since then she has been in and out of the hospital, and my dad has too. Today, they are both disabled.

Okay, so yeah, maybe we are kind of different. But I think I got the better deal. Because I went through that, I have learned so many things.

I went through a lot to get where I am today. Now at the young age of 18, I can make a full, healthy meal for my family, do laundry all day and clean at the same time, and disassemble and reassemble an entire oxygen concentration machine to transport it. Those are just some of the material things that I've learned. I think the life lessons I've learned are much more important.

I've learned to not take people for granted because you never know if they'll still be there tomorrow. I've learned to take things slow and take in life because you only have this moment once. I've learned that it's important to grow up now because if you have to grow up instantly when something bad happens, it's going to be much harder.

I've learned about myself too. I am strong, and life gets hard sometimes, but if I can get through classes and extracurriculars, go back and forth an hour and a half to the hospital multiple times a week, and still get a 4.0, is there much that I can't do?

I've learned that if something is really getting to me, it probably matters a lot to me because I've been through the fire and I'm still here standing strong.

So don't look at me like I'm a baby bird with a broken wing when I tell you about my parents. Look at all I've gone through. It's not just in the past; I still live with this every single day, but I'm still here, thriving and surviving. The fact that my parents are older and disabled doesn't mean my life is any worse than yours. If anything, it's been so much more enriched than I ever could've asked for.