Memoir Monday #52. A sad experience and a life lesson

This is the last chapter of the first season of this initiative that @ericvancewalton called Memoir Monday. I apologize for the audacity to be suggesting that there will be a second season, but it is what many of us are hoping for.

Despite being the last chapter, my posting today is not an adventure that has an ending that was all happiness, although, in the long run, it has been a positive thing in my life.

In the summer of 1977 I was 10 years old and had completed the fifth grade.

For me it was an academic year that, in some subjects, I finished with very good grades and, in others, I finished with good grades. I thought that everything would be happiness because I had finished another year with good grades, but when I got home, my mother gave me a life lesson that I learned for the rest of my life.

It turns out that in two subjects I finished with grades of 8 out of a maximum of 10 points and in the other 5 subjects I finished with grades of 10.

However, my mother told me that I had had a course that had not been good and punished me for most of the summer. I couldn't play, I couldn't be with my friends, I couldn't go out or watch TV. She looked for books of those two subjects in which I had had grades of 8 and I had to read, summarize, explain elements of these subjects and many other elements.

The argument of my mother's punishment was that all my grades had to be 9 and above because that was my job and my future. When I finished a course, those were the grades she accepted and the rest were synonyms of little effort, not paying attention in class and that the punishment would be to use my vacations to study.

I remember on August 28, 1977, when a few days before the end of my vacation, she lifted my punishment and asked me to give her an explanation of the books I had read during my vacation.

Although such a small child could not understand how it was possible that I did not enjoy with other children in a vacation period, the truth is that it was a life teaching because I was never again left without vacation, I became an excellent student, in love with his subjects and someone who studied and prepared for the future.

Thanks to this, I have always strived to achieve the maximum possible in the things I do, exams, projects, in my work and in everything that has to do with reaching a goal.

Note: I have used the translator DeepL Translate.

The photos are from my family album.