Tag: family

After our 7D6N “staycation” at Mount Alvernia Hospital, I said a silent prayer to the Big Guy Up There.

Please, I whispered in my head, let this cycle of mad illnesses end here now.

Three days later, Aidan was diagnosed with HFMD.

So yeah, there is a sense of WHAT THE FUCKERY lingering around here. When we heard the dreaded four letters from the GP’s mouth (that’s HFMD and not TOTO), Mr Thick and I visibly sank in our Birkenstocks. Back home, he looked at me in despair and said, “When are we ever going to catch a break?”

Because, poor man. He had a 10-day sabbatical leave and we were meant to do all sorts of romantic and sexxxxay things together. Like clear out the storeroom. Redo the boys’ room. Clean our study table. Install the invisible grilles in our balcony. Repair our aircon. Have coffee every single day. Have a meal here and there. Sleep. Go for a family vacation. But he ended up shuttling between our parents’ homes, our home and the hospital everyday. Not only that, he was also permanently attached to his work laptop during those 10 days because, obviously, the company would absolutely DIE without him.

But you know what, there are little things to be thankful for in life and I am not going to sit here and whine about how crappy and sucky it has been. I mean, it HAS been ridiculously crappy and sucky around here.

It’s also been good.

Aidan turned 2.5 years old and his verbal and comprehension abilities astound us so. (His toddler angst astound us too, though on another end of the spectrum.) He says the funniest things and has an amazing memory. Zac, oddly enough, is now three months old. I say oddly enough because I look at the itty bitty babies snuggled in the arms of their mothers at the hospital and wonder where my little squish has gone. He now resembles, in my very unbiased opinion, a garden gnome. Mr Thick and I still make each other laugh and we have not harboured thoughts of stabbing the other with a fork. Yet.

At the end of the day, we are going through this together as a family. Hopefully, nobody will need therapy in time to come.

As I sit here typing this, my nose is running, my hands are as cold as ice, and the back of my throat feels like sandpaper. It’s no exaggeration when I say that I FEEL LIKE CRAP. And obviously, I look like crap too.

BUT. That is not the point. I am not here to whine and whinge about my illness. Okay, maybe just a little. WHINE WHINE WHINE. Now stop.

I have never appreciated how much work my mother put into bringing me up until I became a mother myself. It’s so cliched but true. As a mother, you don’t have “off” days. Even if you are sick, you still have to haul your ass up to do whatever is necessary because your child needs you. My baby isn’t going to feed, bathe and put himself to bed just because mama is feeling ill. Even if you had a bad day at work, you still have to put on a big smile and pull on that Mama hat because you just have to.

At least I have a helper now who can take over the cleaning up, and a husband who is able to put my little man to bed while I lie on the bed for a brief respite. Back then, my mother never had any of that. It was just her and two kids, whom she had to bring up by herself.

As someone who never had the privilege of education, she had to work long hours in order to feed us two. And she missed out on so many priceless moments of our lives. Not once was she able to attend the ceremonies in which I received book prizes, neither did she attend a single choir performance of my life. And I sang for 13 YEARS.

Which is why now that I have my own child, I am absolutely insistent on letting her have at least partial care of A while I am at work. She never had the chance to be joyful about our growth, it was always about survival for her. How to make sure that we have the money to go to school and pay for textbooks, how to make enough money such that we are not deprived of little treats like renting books to read (for me). Toys were non-existent in our house but books, oh my, all the books that I read!

Now that the stress of having to bring up her own children is out of the way, she can finally relax and just be a caregiver. And it’s evident that she is enjoying it immensely. She shifted all her furniture out of the way so that the boys have a large space to run/crawl/ride their trikes, switched out pieces that had sharp corners to those without, and plays with them. She turns on music and encourages them to dance, and takes them down to the playground every evening.

Never mind that her house has been turned topsy turvy, never mind that toys line the hallway, never mind that milk bottles clutter her dining table. It’s a little house that’s full of love and warm and joy. The house speaks of laughter and tears and milestones reached.

Sure, the situation is not perfect. She gets upset with me when I refuse to feed A porridge (I mean, he gets porridge EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Surely it’s not wrong for me to offer him variety.), turns on the TV in the house even though I have said that I am limiting A’s exposure to TV, and slips some sugar into the chrysanthemum or barley drink that she feeds him.

But to see her eyes light up every time A smiles at her? And to see my little man kiss her goodbye? It’s well worth it.

Today, my son “met” my father for the first time.

And I was struck by just how much that had meant to me.

You see, my father died when I was six. In the years that ensued, I had built and lived a life in his absence. Because he had passed on when I was still a young child, I did not really feel the void that his death had created in my life, not in the same way that it had affected the lives of my mother and my sister.

Last year, I had missed out on attending the Qing Ming procedures because of the birth of my little man. And this year, he almost missed it again, having fallen asleep in the car en route to the columbarium. We decided that Mr Thick would remain in the car with him while I went up to my father’s niche to pay my respects.

And we did, my aunt and my cousins and my mom – the women who had lost so many people along the way. These days, we can stand around the niches and exchange fond, amusing memories of the dead but that in itself took many long years of learning to forgive and accept. We laughed and knelt and bowed our heads in prayer, hoping that those whom we had loved and departed all too soon were in good hands somewhere, somehow.

Shortly after, we left. And just as we reached the carpark, the little boy woke up from his short-lived nap. I was ready to leave but Mr Thick gently pushed me into taking Aidan to pay his respects to Gong Gong. And so off we went again, hauling the kid up to the niche.

Of course, he had no idea what the occasion was. He pounded his tiny fists against the glass that protected my father’s niche, and gave it quizzical looks. I explained to him that this is Gong Gong.

This is mama’s daddy, I said.

He studied my father’s photo, banged his hands against the glass and made some indecipherable noise.

Knock knock! I said, in jest. Gong Gong is not going to appear just because you are knocking at his door, you know.

My little man laughed, as if he understood my joke.

And in that moment, my heart welled up with an emotion that I could not identify.

I don’t think I can ever put in words or measure just how much my father’s death had altered the course of my existence. I will never know just how I would have turned out if he had been around. And I have always dismissed his absence as an unfortunate incident in my life.

But I must miss him more than I have ever realised.

Papa, this is your grandson. Wherever you are, I hope you are happy to know that you have him. Please look after him, and give him your blessings.