“Salar, stop playing that video game and come down here this instant,” my mother told me. When I came downstairs, she said that I would have to clean the mess in my room and put my clothes in the laundry basket as she was going to go to work. I started to protest but she gave me a stern loom. Then she left for her office.

For some time I watched TV, but then I remembered mum’s scolding, so I got up and cleaned the room, sorted my clothes while thinking how could my mother be so hard on me and make me do the household chores, especially when it were summer vacation and I should have been playing outside.

I was exhausted … I lay down on the sofa in the TV lounge and thought about the tough day and boring work. Suddenly, my eyes caught sight of a large folder in the book shelf. Curious to see what was inside it, I opened it. I saw that my mother had noted her schedule for the whole week.

I couldn’t believe that she worked overtime and then she had also made a menu of what she would cook each day for me and there was a list of different things she had to do. I realised how much household chores she had to take care of once she got back home from work … her schedule was so tight that she did not even have time to watch TV. And I realised how tired she must be after coming from office and then doing the chores all by herself.

She never asked me to help her, all she ever did was to ask me to clean the clutter I make in my room so that she could at least get a few spare minutes to do other work. She was doing all this for my comfort and future. And I was getting exhausted just by sorting a few things around my room.

That day, I vowed to do everything that I could to help my mum so that she too could get some spare time to relax. I vacuumed the carpet and washed the dishes. And I also looked up the recipe for making brownies from the internet and baked brownies.

That day when she returned home, she couldn’t believe that I had done all what she said and much more. She hugged me and then I gave her the brownies and told her that she should relax that day and can now tell me whatever she wanted me to do and I would try my best to help her.

Published in Dawn, Young World, December 25th, 2015