What If....

I was having a conversation with a colleague who mentioned she was going to have lunch with her mom. That made me wonder about the nature of my relationship with my mother should she be alive today. I often wondered too, how differently I would have turned out should she had been around during my teenage hood. Would I have studied as hard as I did for my PSLE and secured a place in her dream school for me? Would I have gorged myself with the forbidden delights that she was so careful to keep me from eating for fear of me blooming into a little Michellin kid? (Well Mother is more often than not always right for I did bloomed, more like ballooned, in the way she was trying to prevent.) Would I have rebelled by taking TSD (Theatre Studies and Drama) in JC, develop overtly anti-establishment ideas and behaviour and kept the numerous late nights I did? Would she have opposed vehemently to my relationship with a Muslim boy? Would I have defied her and converted to Islam and married this boy? The answers to these questions I will never know and are not the point of this reflection.

My mother has always been the centre of my life, and later, my brother's life. She is the one who put the crayon in my hand and tirelessly troop me to one Art competition after another, convinced that I had artistic talents. She was also the one who inspired my love for the Mandarin language and performance. I remember performing cross-talk as a kindergarten kid and parading as Zhu Ba Jie, the pig in Journey To The West . I also remember the weekly story-telling sessions we attended at Queenstown Library before hopping over to Blk 81 Commonwealth Close where my Grandma lived. There was no where we went and nothing we did without my mother. My father, by the time I was twelve, was a blurry memory. Whatever I know about him I found out from old photographs and stories my aunt told. Except for the time when we ate at Pizza Hut and watched Back To The Future. But that is another story which I might tell later.

My mother had always been a pillar of strength, never saying no in the face of adversity. There had been many a nights when she sewed late into the night to add to the household income. With the pedaling of the Singer machine as my lullabye and colourful fabric of various textures and hues adorning the room my brother and I shared, I fell in love with the art of tailoring and dreamed of being a fashion designer a long time ago. Her dedication to every single piece of garment she was sewing was and still is unparalleled. Her tailoring was precise and meticulous, standards that I applied when looking for a seamstress to sew my wedding garments. How I wished the that my mother was still around to make me the beautiful dresses she used to make.

Maybe Mother worked too hard. Maybe fate had something else in store for all of us. She was diagnosed with Lukemia when I was in Primary 6 and nose-dived into the depths of the illness. No longer did the pedals of the Singer sewing machine sound late till the night for Mother spent more time in the hosital than at home. For a long time after her death, I cannot for the life of me remember how I felt than. I can only rememeber doing everything that I couldn't do when she was around at home, looking down from the kitchen window, waiting for me to come back from school. Perhaps for the longest time I was guilt-ridden about feeling liberation from Mother's watchful eye. So free that I felt that I hadn't the slightest idea how much she was suffering until both my brother and I were called to the Principal's office during recess one day. Someone had come to fetch us to the hospital.

There were lots of people along the corridor leading to my mother's room. My father's siblings, my mother's siblings and many people I do not know. When I eventually got into her room, the sight of her bloated body made me burst into tears. I cried for a long time in the room then I stopped crying altogether. In my 12-year old mind, I somehow had rationalised that eveything happens for a reason and the reason why my mother died was because she would have suffered even more. I was convinced that she had gone to a better place and that she was still watching over me, protecting and guiding me.

Now as an adult, I continue to believe that her passing on happened for a reason but as a Muslim, I have stopped thinking that she is my guardian angel. I now remember her in my prayers and thank her for everything she had done for me for they made me who I am today.

But I still can't help wondering, "What if....?"

Nasyitah
11th Nov 2007