Growing up as a younger child with a brother nearly 16 years older than me has not been a cakewalk. My parents had essentially finished raising a child and had ushered him out of the nest by the time I was born. In a way, my parents were novices when they raised me because the last time they had had to change a diaper was about a decade and a half earlier.

This has set their expectations for me at a whole new level. All the mistakes my brother had made in the past, I was expected to make. All his strengths, I was expected to have. This has led to our parents being overly cautious with me, trying to nitpick and change my future to be even better than my brother's. I spent hours listening to lectures about what I should not do -- whether they were relevant or irrelevant to my life.

My parents and I used to fight all the time about the usual things: grades, money, friends, etc. I felt that their strictness was far greater than what my friends experienced from their parents. My sister and I were not allowed to have sleepovers all through our childhood, and they were still tentative far into our high school years.

During junior year, we were not allowed to leave the house at all because it was an “important year that would determine our paths for the rest of our lives.” Each week, my schedule consisted of SAT prep, college prep, application writing, tutoring for my classes, language lessons... You name it, and our parents were on it. These were all crutches that my brother never had to go through, but my parents wanted it all for me.

I felt so trapped; there was no free time and there were no excuses. I felt like I was starting to lose friends, because everyone else went to parties, sleepovers and brunches outside of school together. Every time my friends talked, I felt so left out because every moment was a “you had to have been there” moment.

The higher my parents’ expectations were for me, the more I felt I was disappointing them and moved in the opposite direction. I would spend hours locked in my room demanding them to stay out because I was studying, when all I actually did was binge-watch TV shows and scroll through Facebook. If I could not be with my friends, at least I could stay updated socially.

That is when it all came crashing down on me.

That semester, I got grades so ghastly I can never repeat them. I tried to blame it on my time spent on prepping for standardized tests, but I also did not manage to pull a decent score on those tests. My parents said nothing. The silence made me argue more. It was the kind of silence that makes you go insane, because you know their disappointment runs so deep you can no longer control it. In those moments, I knew that I had truly failed them.

I finally understood: I did have the burden of being the baby sibling, but where I thought it was unfair before, I now understood that it was the best opportunity my parents could have given me. High expectations are something we should cherish and strive to meet.

Our parents are not the evil monstrosities that perceive them to be when we are teenagers, something I only came to realize after that aching period of disappointment. Parents are actually hoping for the best for us. It may be hard to believe that when it feels like they are infringing on our personal rights and freedoms. In this fragile time of our youths, we are seeking independence and freedom while our parents are simultaneously trying to hold on to their precious children before they leave for adulthood -- so there will be conflict.

You may argue and you may complain, but having people who actually genuinely care enough about you to raise you, educate you, and protect you makes you the luckiest person in the world.

So in light of Father’s and Mother’s Day, the most important holidays this season, let us all take a moment to call or talk to our parents and just appreciate everything they have done for us to put us where we are today.