Good times with my cool mum

Good times with my cool mum

I will be graduating from university soon. It is an important milestone, one that countless late-night studying and binging sessions have built up to.

For my mother, 2014 marks a different landmark. In June, she turns 65 and will join what Singapore now calls the pioneer generation.

When I read about the Government's new package of benefits for the pioneers, I skimmed through the details of subsidies and lower MediShield Life premiums, imagining 450,000 silver-haired strangers on the receiving end. My mother's hair is jet black.

Still, I keyed in her identity card number for a cursory check. The affirmative hit me. Time has been slipping by.

Living with an ageing parent is something foreign to many 20-somethings.

"Your mum is how old again?" most friends exclaim when I tell them my mother's age. They hear it once more, then linking her birth to historical events like the Japanese Occupation. That's not true, I retort, the war ended well before she was born.

Perhaps it is so hard to believe because my mother is cool. A clerk in her younger days, she left her job to look after me, her only child, when I started primary school.

As a full-time housewife, she never placed an emphasis on school results; tuition for maths or science (two subjects I disliked) was never an option.

I once asked her for help with a particularly hard multiple-choice question. She stared at it and the four answer choices before leaving the dining table.

Then she returned with a die. "It's just one question. If you get five or six, roll again," she said. It was the last time I asked my mother for help with my schoolwork.

She gave me permission to sign my own report cards and excursion slips. To an 11-year-old, that was power. She sent me out to the park to play with friends in the evenings.

She read books to me while tucking me into bed. She massaged the spots that were sore from a workout. She sent me for art classes with my cousins at the community centre. We spent Wednesday nights learning how to scrawl colourful dinosaurs, flowers and HDB blocks.

That year, I received a brand new skate scooter - the top prize in an art competition for which I drew children carrying lanterns at the Mid-Autumn Festival. The scooter was a beautiful bright blue, quite unlike the grey-metallic one I'd got from my father. I couldn't wait to ride it.

My mother had other ideas. She convinced me to give the new scooter to my younger cousin who lived in the same block, a decision that brought us many glorious days of whizzing along void decks together.

And my, could my mother cook. She made chicken curries, herbal boiled soups, achar, char siew and the yam cakes she was famous for in the family.

Mother being the gentle breeze through childhood meant my father played bad cop.

He was tender, but strict. Loving, but a pessimist. He made sure I got the grades, and sent me for Chinese classes. He used the cane when I refused to do my homework. And when the PSLE results came out, he spent an afternoon with me flipping through a thick book with aggregate scores to choose my secondary school.

Mum stayed out of those conversations.

After cancer took my father when I was 15, I tried to take his place in the things he and my mother loved to do.

Tensions ran high when she began asking me to put more effort into studying. There were many teary-eyed lunches.

We went shopping at the household department of Tangs; I accompanied her to the market. I blocked out Sunday afternoons and three weekday dinners so my mother and I could have lengthy conversations.

As time healed, my weekdays were freed up for friends. I made it to the occasional Sunday lunch with her.

University also meant periods of leaving Singapore and leaving my mother behind. In 2012, I went to Adelaide for six months and fell in love with its slow pace and easy-going culture. I got busy with a final-year project, travelling to the Philippines and Cambodia on reporting trips.

I took up freelance jobs to save up for travelling. I was almost always working. I saw her less and less.

Graduation, for me, comes with a prize - a budget trip to Europe with two close friends. But when I return, I will be back for good, and spending more time with mum.

Annabelle Liang is a final-year journalism student at Nanyang Technological University's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information.

This article was published on May 11 in The Straits Times.

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