Childhood stories and their importance

Like many other children we also had bedtime stories, and free-time stories. Though I am sure we must have been told more stories with good ending but the stories with tragic ending made a lasting impression on me as I grew up. The story teller were my parents and my grandmother. My grandmother never told us tragic stories, she used to tell us stories of prince and princesses, stories from the mythological literature. Two stories that my parents told us had a huge impression in shaping my young mind. One was the story of Shishir and Basanta, the other was about Nicholas and Jakapo, I do not remember the story but both dealt with two brothers whose parents died when they were young and they were subjected to harshness by their step-mothers and relatives. I could relate their story to our family, me, my brother and two parents. That firmly established a fear in me that life will be harsh if we lost our parents and there is a possibility we might lose our parents. In both the stories the elder brother had to take care of the younger brother in some way and probably I was worried if something fateful happened how would I take care of myself and my brother. This inevitably made me weak emotionally, too much dependent on my parents. When young I often used to go desire to stay at my grandparents place overnight. But when night came, the thought of my mother would be too overwhelming, I used to worry what will happen of her, will she be alright and worse of all she was alone (as my father was posted in the far eastern part of the country). I will cry and cry until my uncle carried me home in the middle of the night. Even when asleep, I would constantly play with the lips of my mother while all my brother needed was me.
Our paternal grandparents lived in the eastern region of the country and so did our uncles. We used to visit them during dashain the most important 15-days long festival celebrated in the country. Me and my brother used to get very excited as dashain approached. We just loved travelling in bus an entire night to be in the expanse fields, and welcoming relatives. Schools remained closed for a minimum of a month during the festival. So on one such occasion my parents seeing the enthusiasm in their children to go to Jhapa, made an arrangement to send us early with one of our relatives. We were all excited, my father had come to see us off. As the bus ignited its engine, all my excitement came shattering down the prospect of leaving my parents behind was unbearable. I was crying uncontrollably and that continued probably for 4 hours. When we reached our grandparents home, I made a small table to keep track of number of days when my parents will arrive. Every day I would erase the number at the end. So when we arrived at our grandparents place there were fifteen numbers. Next day I will erase 15 so I have 14 days left and so on until our parents arrived. I missed them miserably while my brother didn't care as long as I was by his side. I was growing up into an emotionally weak and rather unstable person.