Balance: A Short Story

If there’s one thing I should have learned by now but haven’t learned yet, it’s balance. By balance I do not mean being able to stand on one foot without falling in a petty amount of seconds, but yes, I should have probably learned that by now also. The type of balance I’m talking about is more time management based. It sounds very cliche, but everybody makes this kind of mistake every once in awhile, I unfortunately make this mistake all the time, but there’s one very memorable time that always will stick out to me. “Please please please,” I begged to my parents. My mother defended herself, “I have no problem with it, it’s your father that you’ll have to convince.” I turned towards my dad and gave him the puppy dog eyes. “I’ll take care …show more content…
We walked into the kitten room and immediately a black and white tuxedo cat stuck her paw through the bars of her cage and squeaked a high pitched meow. All of our attention remained on her until it was time to leave. My mother declared that she had fallen in love with that kitten and she would highly regret letting somebody else adopt her. The next few days my mother tried to talk my father into getting the kitten since the hold we put on her was approaching expiration. Everytime he gave her harsh rejection. A couple days before Christmas, the day that the hold on the kitten was going to expire, my father arrived home from work. We were all outraged that he still would not let us get a pet after two years, so none of us spoke to him. “If you guys aren’t going to talk to me, I’m not going to show you what I got,” he taunted. I rolled my eyes. Nothing he could have gotten would have been better than what we were wanting. My mom finally gave in and sighed, “What is it?” With no reply, my dad went into his car and brought out a box with holes on the sides. He opened it and the kitten we had fallen in love with jumped out, purring intensely. Our jaws dropped in …show more content…
However, I was back at school and too busy to do many of the things I had promised my father that I was going to do to take care of the cat. “I’ll make sure her food bowl is full while you’re at school,” my mom warned, “but you have to do everything else.” Being the apathetic elementary schooler I was, I failed to even attempt making a constant schedule where I would complete all of the chores I had to do to take care of our kitten. One afternoon, I arrived home from school and my kitten squeaked for me to follow her. I chased her all around the house to the laundry room where her litterbox was located. She looked up at me and meowed pitifully. Right there, I immediately felt horrendous for not cleaning out her litterbox in a few days. Even though I’ve made the mistake many times, I still get myself in situations where I struggle to balance, which is why I still have yet to learn it. Looking at a situation on a higher note makes it easier to get through it. Sometimes it takes a few falls before you can get back up and balance yourself out. I like to consider the litterbox incident with my kitten one of those falls because in the end I balanced myself out and made a schedule that I was able to stick