Back in my Malaysian home last month for some family time and terrific home cooking, I got to asking my parents about how my second uncle was faring now that he could no longer walk.

'Ah Lian is taking care of him full-time,' said my mother, referring to my widowed uncle's youngest daughter, an easygoing bachelorette who used to work supermarket tills.

I wondered aloud as to why her big businessman brother, also her next-door neighbour, did not help out more, as I remembered him having done all he could to make their mother comfortable in her final days.

'Let's just say he and your uncle don't quite see eye to eye,' said my mother, in between bites of fruit.

'Well, you know what they say, fathers favour daughters and mothers have a soft spot for sons,' I said, gazing at my father, who was trying to spear a slice of pear with a toothpick in his shaky hand.

'Mothers and daughters too, surely?' retorted my mother, her voice a tad querulous. She put her fruit fork down.

'Well...' I began to demur, but then thought the better of it.

That my Mum had asked that question at all spoke volumes about how far our relationship had come.

The heart often says what the mind is too proud to think, and I knew my mother was worried about what life with me would be like, as I will be taking her in after my father passes on.

I can see why Cutie Pie, which is what I like calling my mother these days, is anxious. As a child, I was a proper thorn in her side, being too excitable and stubborn to toe anyone's line.

She coped by keeping me in check with tonnes of tough love.

Menstrual cramps? Get up and get yourself to school, she would say. Chest pains? Sure it isn't just guilty twinges from wanting to skip your Malay Language test today? Sleepy? Let's see if this feather-duster will help you do your homework.

How my sister and I cheered, though, when she confronted school bullies and gave them tongue-lashings they were not likely to forget. Then again, she was the only mother who opened her home to her daughters' classmates who lived too far away to make it back from lunch in time for co-curricular activities - including, much to my annoyance, not a few of those bullies. How they bolted down the biscuits she had baked for tea, in between elbowing me.

I would not have it any other way, though.

Thanks to Cutie Pie's 'like it or lump it' training, I did not flinch three months ago when nurses challenged me to stand a day after abdominal surgery. Stand, I commanded my hips and legs. I stood - for 45 minutes.

And so it went, till I shocked the nurses by climbing up and down a short flight of stairs to pay my hospital bill the day I was discharged. Time for the tough to get going.

As I sat sorting through my father's papers some days after our chat, a small, black album of faded photographs fell out. I flipped it open.

Here was Cutie Pie as a young mother washing greens at the kitchen sink, her shoulders and arms forming a graceful arc over the family's soon-to-be meal for the day.

Here she was again at the Lake Gardens in Kuala Lumpur, heavily pregnant with my sister, yet forming that same arc of grace over me as I sat pig-tailed and lax-jawed, with one slipper about to fall off my foot.

I nipped into the kitchen and showed my mother the snapshots, all the work of my shutter-happy father.

'I like this the most,' she said, gazing at a picture of me petting our pet pooch Sandy as it sat in my doll's pram.

'This is my favourite,' I said, flipping to our Lake Gardens moment. She smiled.

Happy Mother's Day.

This article was first published in The Sunday Times on May 11, 2008.