A Mother’s Monologue

I was going through some old posts and just HAD to repost this as I was thinking of Mom all day today. Why? Because I cooked up a storm in the kitchen and everything looked impressive (to me la!) but the truth is, Mom did all the hard work! She would pound all the chillies for sambal petai and prawn sambal or whatever curry paste or chilli paste I liked and then freezed it so I could easily just throw in the prawns, fish, whatever…..and cook. Voila!

MY BEAUTIFUL MAMA

Love your mother, even if she drives you so insane you want to kill her or yourself. Love her, dead or alive. Love her, because she is the only mother you’ll ever have, you’ve ever had. And despite what you think, despite what she does, despite what she says, know deep down thats she loves you too.

Strawberries are a favourite fruit of T1 as her Nana always cuts it up and makes a delish cream to go with it so strawberries are a common site in Nana’s house.

One day, when Nana was caring for T2 and the baby was getting cranky, Nana shouted out to T1, “T1! Please go bring in the strawberry!”

A puzzled T1 walked out and back into the room, “What strawberry, Nana?”

“Mommy’s strawberry! T2 likes Mommy’s strawberry, it’s on the coffee table. Go bring it quick.”

T1 runs out to look for the estranged strawberry but sees nothing red on the coffee table, nor anything that remotely smells of fruit. Being the resourceful girl that she is, she even looks on the dining table, the TV cabinet, the floor, the ceiling, inside her pants………but no strawberries!

“I can’t find it, Nana….”

Amidst wails of crankiness, trying to pacify a baby missing her Mama, Nana said in controlled curtness, “It’s out there, my dear! I just saw it!!!”

T1 runs out again to focus. And concentrate. Mommy always tells her to FOCUS. And she starts wishing Mommy would come home quickly with some strawberries. Still no strawberries. Sheepishly, she walked back into the bedroom and told Nana she couldn’t find the strawberry.

In exasperation, Nana told T1 to keep an eye on T2 so she could get it herself and stormed out. Seconds later, she handed the strawberry to T2 and there was immediate silence.

T1 looked at the strawberry with intense bewilderment. Were her eyes playing tricks with her or was she starting to have a delayed English vocabulary problem? It had been awhile since she did have strawberries but the last she remembered, they were still red. She finally summoned the courage to speak, “THAT’S not a strawberry?????????????????”

It’s not?? It was Nana’s turn to be puzzled.

“NO!!! It’s A BLACKBERRY!!” T1′s annoyance immediately shifted to hysterical laughter that her Nana thought a blackberry was a strawberry. 5 year olds find things like that darn funny.

“Aiya, how do I know? Strawberry, blackberry, blueberry…..you all have so many berries!!”

“No????? There is only ONE Blackberry! HAHAHAHA….!!!!” T1 continued to laugh. The important thing was T2 was happy. Bless Nana.

My mommy, as smart as she is (and she is VERY smart, have you ever seen the size of her forehead? It’s like a Tyra Banks hammerhead shark and she’d eat you alive any day if warranted!) and as kind; has a mental block when it comes to technology. She does not use a computer (except for checking stocks) and she has the most basic of phones. Give her an i-phone and she’d use it as paper weight. Give her a Nokia communicator? She’d fling it at you as a weapon from frustration of not being able to sms. Her French automobile only sees the Golden Triangle between where she lives, where I live, and KLCC (and everything else in between). Don’t give her directions to Shah Alam for she’d end up in Balakong, worse the border of Laos. If Uncle Ben were to tell T1 he bought a new mouse, Nana would be screaming how dare you buy a mouse? Get that thing out of my house right now!!

I intend to teach her how to use a laptop soon with step by step instructions as Uncle Ben will be leaving the country and they will need to stay in touch. Besides, being online is so much fun!

Yes, that will be my new project for the year. Nevermind that I am so busy with the baby without any help and all that. I am so inspired by all these Moms out there that I want to do something too! So this is it. I will be selling clothes that have all things glitterati, twinkles, sparkles, bling-bling! and the best part??? I have hired my Mother to sew in all the blings so you can be sure that they are all original in design and of high quality. If you have an old piece of clothing that you’re bored with, or it has a stain, don’t throw it out yet! Send it over as we’ll give it a refreshing makeover so much so that you will love it again.

So, all this talk and we have only sewn 5 pieces so far. Heh. I’ve been wondering what the best way is to display the clothes. Hire a model to wear them? Or hang them with a hanger? Or lay them down flat? Hmmm…..if only I had the budget to get everything professionally done but unfortunately, this is a home-based no budget business……

Any ideas? Let me introduce my first Spanish Senorita top ala Lolita. Lolita was purchased from the Australian clothes store Suzanne Grae for AUD$40 and has never been worn. Brand new. It was plain red though and…..a bit plain. The only thing it had going was that it was pretty low cut. Sexy. I’m not sure why I bought it. It is made of Rayon/Viscose/Nylon and is stretchy and I hardly ever wear stretchy stuff due to my ‘voluptous’ figure. So I made Nana dress it up with some black sequins and she added a little bow to the front and voila! I present to you, Lolita…..

Hung on a hanger….

Detail of sewing….

Modelled by my free model…..hehe…..

Obviously, I need to photograph these clothes with a better camera and certainly in better lighting!!! These were taken at night!!! Oh well, we live and learn. So, so, so??? How should I display these clothes? There are some very exciting pieces and after Nana was finished with them, I was like…..oh no…..I don’t want to sell them after all. They are so nice. But I cannot fit into them, so what should I do? The Hubs goes, SELL THEM!!!

Lolita sells for RM100. Yeah, that’s the Hubs’ price. He said he cannot lose money in this, just because I bought it for RM120 and then Nana put her sweat into sewing in the sequins, which also cost money plus she uses the most expensive thread for sewing sequins so that you can dump embellished clothes into the washing machine without worry. And the Hubs came up with RM100.

Of course, I’ll set up a new blog for this project. Eventually.

Every year, Nana fights with Mother’s Day in order to celebrate her birthday. Perhaps it is apt that her birthday falls in line with Mother’s Day because what a Mother she is!

I asked Tok-Tok recently why he loved her, a simple uneducated ‘kampung’ girl…. and he said that she was an incredibly amazing woman. Sophisticated, sensuous, truly remarkable. Even from such a young age. He is right. She is. Words cannot do justice on why I even think that but let me share a story with you that my Mother recently shared with me.

When I was a baby, my mother was the house maid for 11 people (because my biological father had left us). My grandmother would lock me up in a room downstairs and made my mother do all her chores before she could see me, her baby. She was only allowed to see me when it was feeding time, for a very brief period, just to feed. All day, I would be stuck in the play pan in a room all by myself wailing and wailing and wailing whilst my mother RUSHED her housework as best she could (and perhaps this is why she is so good at it!) just so she could finally have her own baby in her arms. It was pure AGONY for her to hear her baby crying and crying and crying, yet there was nothing she could do except finish up the housework to my grandmother’s standard (which was very high as she was a sterile nurse), get all the laundry done, iron all the clothes et al before she could have access to her own baby. Her own little screaming baby. It’s amazing I still have my vocal chords. How cruel!

Every single day after her chores, she would run to me and carried me to her room without even bothering to shower first as all she wanted was for me to stop crying. And then she would cry together with me alone seated in a  little corner. One day, one of her brothers came into the prison where I was, to play with me for awhile so I would be quiet. This was when my grandmother was out, of course. Otherwise, no one dared disobey Grandma.

And when she was telling me this story, her voice was slightly jittery. If you knew my mother, you would know how she never cries, how she is a woman of steel, how she can be unfazed with the most traumatic of events and how she is a sea of calm even if her son crashed her car (haha, brother are you reading this?). Seriously, my mother is a lady who can take on a lot without tears. Like when she first discovered she had cancer. It was all the rest of us who were crying, not her. She was just making jokes out of the situation. That’s my mother for you. So for her to have a jittery voice, it was obviously something that had a real impact on her. And naturally, when she told me, tears flooded down my pastel cheeks as I imagined T2 being locked away from me crying for hours on end. How cruel!

I don’t think I would have stood for it for I don’t know how long but in those days, you just did not disobey your mother. But the abuse and torture was so bad that eventually, after months of heart-felt anguish, my mother ran away with me, her baby – the only other person in the world who loved her.

And this is when she started her new life……

And there came us, her new family. Her own family.

To this day, my mother does not have a relationship with her mother but she does respect her by buying her jewelery and ensuring she is OK. Apart from that, nothing. They don’t talk short of the very banal monologues. I used to think that if only she would forgive her own mother for what she had done, perhaps she would have a better life and not have cancer. But when her own brothers who were there to see for their own eyes how my mother was abused, don’t even suggest to her that she should form a relationship with my grandmother, I realise how much more had happened and how it is perhaps almost impossible to forgive. And even if my mother has forgiven my grandmother, she has certainly not forgotten. It is not something one forgets easily. Even after more than half a century.

So today, we celebrated Nana’s birthday with her loved ones.

Tok-Tok’s eyes blurred out cuz my camera gave him the red eye effect and he looked like a monster.

No prizes for guessing who the entertainer of the evening was!

Doesn’t she look happy?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NANA. You’re home with us now……..

Our wish for you is that you continue to fight this cancer that has taken half your teeth away, tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of dollars into the medical profession , pharmaceuticals and air tickets, this cancer that disables you to eat properly so that you have to depend on yogurt and Haagen Daz, that disables you to talk or even move sometimes because you are in so much pain despite the morphine, which sometimes removes your will to live and continue the fight; our wish is that you conquer this. So you live long enough to see ME become a grandmother. I frigging kid you not.