I’ve already established that my boy has an astounding vocabulary including words like “hepatitis” and “coincidentally“. Admittedly, they sound like “I like this” and “go see telly” but hey, close enough.
Just for kicks, I make him repeat ridiculously long words and he nails them every time. But there’s one word that is his archilles’ heel. That’s “grandma”.
Broken down, he has no problem with the syllables but joined together, his brain has an override mechanism that makes him say “mommy” instead.
I have no idea why that is so but suffice to say, there is a fair bit of confusion every time he calls mommy.
I was just thinking that motherhood is a lot like fighting a war. And I don’t mean it as a hyperbole, like how tough it is because being in a war is way worse. I know that.
You know how war vets, when they meet another veteran, whom they have never met, instantly feel like they’re soulmates. It’s kind of the same with being a mother. Because the moment a screaming baby pops out of your uterus, your life changes forever. But the world goes on, and people who haven’t experienced it themselves, don’t really know what it’s like to be there for somebody every second of every day.
In that moment, you transform into a parent. The kind of people who can’t stop talking about their kids. Their milk intake, their superb crawling abilities, their boogers, their cute little toes that send you hyperventilating. People who don’t have kids smile politely but 5 minutes in, they’re bored out of their skulls as you regale them with yet another story of how incredible it was that your sweet little munchkin learnt how to stuff his pinky up his nostril. Like “look, here’s a close up of the nostril, and here, and here and oh, the one is really good…”
After a while. you learn a bit of restraint.
You make a mental note to talk about the weather or the latest movie that you obviously haven’t had the time to watch.
Until you meet another mother. Who’s been in the trenches. Who also hasn’t slept in months. Whose boobs are all sore and lumpy and saggy. Who looks just about as crazy as you do. And then it’s like you’ve found a real friend. You trade babies and share tips on how to make you life less of a nightmare. But most of all, you heave a sigh of relief and feel glad that you’re not the only one in the world who fell off the globe as the world went on without you.
Motherhood, it’s a strange and wonderful thing.
It’s like fighting a war that nobody else but you knows about. Sometimes you get all beat up and wounded and you feel like you’re all alone. But then you realize that you’re not. That tons of mothers are going through the exact same thing. That’s when you find solidarity and friendship.
To me, that’s one of the best surprises in being a mom.
Maybe it’s because Kirsten is a girl. And my youngest (for now). And I’ve done this before so I’m not uptight about having my baby be way ahead of the pack in terms of milestone development. But I find myself babying Kirsten far more than I’ve babied Tru.
She doesn’t like tummy time and she can barely support her own weight for more than a second before her knees give way and crumble to the ground. So mostly she just rolls around on the bed or sits on my chest. Every time I think that she’s teething, it’s a false alarm and till this day, she’s still gummy and toothless.
Which is so different from Tru. Who sprouted teeth at 4 months. And started cruising at 8 months.
In a way, I’m less bothered about having them reach their milestones just because baby centre says they’re supposed to start crawling at 7 months. Or start to walk at 11 months. They’ll get there soon enough and I really do like not having to chase after 2 extremely mobile babies. Also, on the bright side, Kirsten’s lack of mobility means that she hasn’t had a single injury yet. No hard knocks or falling off the bed or massive bleeding. In my house, that’s a miracle.
Anyway, my point is that in the past week, she’s suddenly grown up. It’s like she just decided to stop being a baby. One day she’s helpless and immobile and then all of a sudden, she’s like “I’ve had enough! My life can’t go on like this.” She’s now sitting and crawling and playing with toys and making her presence felt.
I’m not complaining though. It’s just that this growing up business sneaks up on you like a ninja. 7 months in, I almost forget what it’s like when she was a newborn.
This morning, I picked her up and kissed her like I do every morning. Then I took a deep whiff and realized that the baby smell, the lovely smell that makes me go all mushy inside, it’s totally gone. I stood there sniffing her all over like a bloodhound like maybe a faint trace of it was stuck in her armpits but nada.
And the worst part? I can’t even really remember what it smells like anymore.
I hate the end of breaks almost as much as I love having them in the first place. It’s a conundrum. I hate it so much that I almost wish it didn’t exist in the first place. Except that I don’t because not having breaks at all means that life is just one huge, never-ending suckfest.
I spend most of my days counting down to the next long break and we try to plan one every quarter, at least.
Ever since the year started, I’ve been looking forward to the this first break. Coinciding with the Lunar New Year, Kelvin took a nice, long week off for some family time.
That’s 9 whole days of having daddy at home. 9 days of sleeping in, going for brunches, hanging out and spending time away from this pain in the ass called work.
This past week, we did all sorts of crazy stuff with the kids all day. Like smoking a pipe, polishing shoes and trading stuff at the playground. You know, stuff children don’t really get to do on a normal school day.
hang on, while I chew on my pipe and think
are these shoes for real?
So we were at Mackers for breakfast and Tru got 2 balloons from the nice lady behind the counter. After a while, he got bored with them so he went over to the playground and traded them for 2 spiderman figurines. Somehow, he managed to con the other kid into thinking that it was a fair trade. I mean, I seriously don’t teach him this stuff so I have no idea where he learns it from. Eventually we made him give it back, but we secretly gave each other high fives because you got to admit, that’s some kind of awesome.
Then at night, we put the kids to bed and watched movies at home and held hands and snuggled up in bed just like we used to do. We watched soccer and stayed up late talking about our kids and our dreams. In short, it was a week of complete incredibleness.
But as quickly as it came, it’s suddenly all over and the feeling of going back to the mill, that’s exquisite misery. It almost makes me wish that I didn’t have so much fun because it wouldn’t suck to bad to have to say goodbye. As I counted down the final hours of our little break, I had the most severe bout of Monday Blues so I sat down looking all miserable as I expressed my milk.
And my husband, who totally deserves an award for this, set about packing and cleaning the entire house, because he says “I know it makes you feel a lot better tomorrow when the house is clean“. That’s when my panties melted because there’s nothing sexier than a man who knows how to get down and dirty with Mr Muscle.
The lunar new year does not agree with small kids. All that visiting and gorging on snacks is turning out to be my worst nightmare. It’s a lethal combination that makes me want to stab myself repeatedly with an ice pick. In the eye.
Because you know, when you visit people, it’s not nice to refuse their love letters, which they rolled lovingly by hand for 16 hours. Or their pineapple tarts. Or the almond cookies that their great-grandmother honed to perfection in ancient China. Or the truckload of snacks all stashed neatly into little glass jars on the dining table.
So you politely take one of each and discreetly hide some in your pocket. The rest, you give to your kids to stop them from going on a rampage from restlessness.
My son has also discovered that when he flashes his megawatt smile, he gets all the candy he wants. So he goes around collecting junk food like a squirrel when I’m not looking. And it’s becoming apparent that he’s far more enterprising than I thought.
Although it translates into two things.
The death of naps and a badass sugar high.
He’s been skipping his naps the past couple of days and I’d be fine with that if he can actually handle it. But no. He goes from Alvin the chipmunk to Chucky to Frankenstein to the Flash multiple times a day. One moment he’d be twitching and bouncing on the spot, then his eyes glaze over and he shuffles around like a zombie and then it all rounds off with the mother of all hissy fits.
Then finally, he falls asleep for 15 minutes and spends the rest of the day looking like this.
Deep down inside, I’m really kind of cheena. Really deep down inside. You have to dig real hard but underneath all those layers of self-professed UN-chineseness, I can’t get away from the fact that my chinese roots are deeper than I thought.
my litle chinese kids
Ok, so writing Chinese characters are the bane of my existence, and my spoken Mandarin is possibly worse than Jackie Chan’s. My Chinese teacher used to get a kick out of making me read passages aloud because it’s monumentally embarrassing for me. Those kungfu Chinese words all look the same to me and I mostly make up words as I go along.
That’s until I traded my friend 2 essays to write down exactly how it sounds like in English at the bottom. Right back at you, liu lao shi.
But that’s not really the point. The one true test of a person’s degree of chineseness only comes around once a year during the Lunar New Year. It’s the BIGGEST affair for every Chinese person, even if you’re living in the hills of Afghanistan. It’s the time of the year where you get away with wearing pigtails and silk costumes. You put on ching-chong-chang music, grab two oranges and go around collecting ang pows.
pigtails and silk costumes
Just like Halloween, except all the costumes look the same and instead of candy, you get real money. Seriously, it doesn’t get any better. Until you’re married and have to start giving corpulent brats dollar bills just because they shoved 2 oranges in your face. That kind of sucks.
And much as you hate to, you have to resist the temptation of giving them monopoly money because you know that the moment they grab it, they’re going to run to the toilet to check it and you’ll be busted.
Right, so the music. For those in the know, it’s called dong-dong-dong-chiang. Because that’s exactly what it sound like. Basically, that’s the whole song. For like 15,000 times. It sounds like the kind of song cool people love to hate.
But here’s the thing. It’s my ultimate guilty pleasure. I’ll never admit to this but since I can be honest on the Internet, I think it’s time to come out of the closet. It’s a big moment for me so maybe we should all observe a moment of silence.
There.
I actually know ALL the lyrics to most of the new year songs and when no one is looking, I sing them with gusto. It’s strangely liberating. There’s all that deafening clanging so you can sing aloud like one big karaoke party.
It all started when I was 13. I went to a Chinese school (shocking, I know) and every year, we do a massive singalong party where we get to ditch the uniforms and rock out to Chinese New Year songs. Being all angsty, I pretended to mumble through the entire set list looking downright sullen but deep down inside, I was rockin it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.
the last emperor
Tomorrow it’s the Lunar New Year yet again. I get to dress up my kids real cute and bring them around to as child labor. It’s going to be so fun.
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