I am a person who is usually very concerned about families and usually I will put the care of my family first even before I take care of myself but something very personal happened to me that made me make some personal decisions about life, for the sake of clarity in this post I will be sharing the knowledge with a story making it easy for everyone to understand.
If you come from a poor or middle classed African home then you will be able to relate to this post properly, when parents decide to send one of the child to school gathering up every other money that they have in the home, they usually have very high expectations that very soon that child will graduate, get a good paying job and then begin to take responsibility of taking care of the entire family as a means of payback for the good that they have done for him by sending him to school.
Unlike in civilized nations where parents see it as their responsibility to send their kids to school, over here it is rather seen as a privilege for the child. There are two young men who came from the same background, one was Thomas and the other was Jude, although they were good friends they had different ideas about life.
Thomas and Jude got a good paying job immediately they graduated from college and of course it was time to take over the responsibility of the family, Thomas gave all that he earned to the upkeep of his family, they certainly moved in with him so that gave him no other option that to foot every of their bills, he was unable to save or invest because the demand of the family was extremely draining.
Jude on the other hand made sure that he kept a safe distance from his family members they communicated on a regular note and whenever there was an outrageous demand from his family he will respectfully tell them that he is not yet financially capable to handle such responsibility. He was able to invest in some high yielding projects and he even got his own house during the first two years of work.
After working hard for the same company for ten years, the company had some financial setbacks and they had to lay off members of staff of which Thomas and Jude were a part of, Thomas had nothing kept for himself not even a piece of investment in his name but Jude simply had a home to go to and lots of investment to fall back on so it was not a problem for him.
If you come from this part of the world and you have extremely demanding relatives, it is important that you set the boundaries clear or you may have to create some safe distance for your own good, this does not mean that families should not be helped but we have to be careful enough to build our own lives also.