In Sickness and in health

I am sick. I am sick of being sick. I have been sick for almost 6 weeks and I haven't gotten well. I have gone to the doctor. The first time I did, she gave me antibiotics for a sinus infection. Two weeks later, I go back and tell her, I am still sick and my nose and ears are still blocked. Was there anything she could do to help? The entire exchange took place with the twins clowning round the consultation room. She looks at them and then looks at me and points at them, stating that she had nothing that would cure 'that'. And until I could get some rest, I wasn' t going to get well.

Rest is fine in theory. But I also have to add. In between that first week I was sick till now, there has been Muffin hospitalised, the twins then coming down with the same stomach bug as Muffin, Evan developing a severe allergic reaction to dust and mosquito bites causing his eyes to swell up like golf balls, Muffin falling ill once again with a milder version of the stomach bug that caused him to be hospitalised and Jordan catching his bug. So while trying to get myself better, I am nursing all these kids in varying degrees of being unwell.

Packrat tells me that I am pushing myself too hard. Indeed I am. I acknowledge that. On top of looking after the children at night, I am teaching more than ever now because tis the exam season. But my response to Packrat was that I couldn't do anything different. Packrat tells me something's gotta give. Let them watch television for a while. Let their homework slide.  I don't know how to do that.

I cannot ignore the child who is coughing her lungs out at night. I cannot ignore the little toddler who tells me at 5.30 in the morning that his diapers are soiled and he needs a change. I cannot in good conscience leave all three children in front of the television at 7 am in the morning while Mommy goes back to bed for another snooze. I can't let them go to class without their homework not done or have them stare blankly at the teacher because Mommy didn't go through the words with them. While I do have a capable helper for once, I do not feel that I should let her or expect her to take over my Mommy duties. So I just do it, to the best of my ability, with  a lot of prayers, adrenaline, general screaming and threatening and just going it one day at a time. But, on top of all that, I cannot tell my office that I can't teach because I am just too exhausted to mentally string words coherently.

I hate it and I am mildly depressed, not knowing when I will ever get a 6 hour stretch of uninterruptied sleep. I keep thinking this will never end. I have stopped seeing it as getting over one bug, but as an incubation period for the next bug to manifest. I am, however, thankful that when they get sick, it isn't all that severe. Muffin being hospitalised was the first time we had gone to Emergency in years. I spend a fortune on vitamins and for the most part it does the job. It's just that with a bug cycle like this and an exhausted Mommy that helps to incubate the bugs rather than break the cycle, we are just merely playing catch up with the symptoms.

Thankfully, I do have something to look forward to. And thankfully, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Otherwise, I suspect my doctor would need to prescribe me with something more than just decongestants and antibiotics. For the last few months, I have been worried about Packrat wanting me to go with him to a conference at Harvard. I have felt guilty about leaving my children behind and not being there to mommy them. But now, about two weeks before I am due to leave, I know that I have to go. If I don't go, I will never, ever get the rest I need to recover. And I will never break out of this illness-induced funk. And judging from the last six weeks, no matter how much medication I throw at the illness, nothing is going to help if I don't get the rest I need.

                                                


What happens to my kids while I am away? They will do all the things that I refuse to let them do under my watch. And do I have any say about it? Not much. Two weeks with the grandparents, watching television and not doing their Chinese will not do them any harm. In fact they will rather enjoy it, he claims. I can't wholeheartedly agree with him because I cannot see beyond the television, the mosquito bites, the iPad and the lack of proper work/Chinese guidance. To me, the damage might be irreparable.

My usually patient husband gets annoyed with me in Mommy overdrive. It is about the only time he pulls rank and makes it clear what he thinks I need. In this case, I need to go with him and I need to get well and that is the priority. For now, even the kids aren't the priority. The kids get well. Despite their being sick, for the most part of the day, they are happy, they eat well and are in good spirits. Me on the other hand, I haven't tasted the real taste of food in 6 weeks, I drag myself out of bed every morning and I feel like I have aged dramatically. My skin bears testament to that; breakouts that in themselves radiate stress and distress.

Now for all of them to just stay healthy.


  Technorati Tags: motherhood, parentint, falling ill

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Learning from the best

I'm going to write this as a tribute to my mother and it's way overdue for Mother's Day but who said Mothers' Day had to be the first Sunday of May anyway. 

Every Mothers' Day, actually, I tell my mom the same thing. And I mean it every time I say it to her. I tell her every year that everything I learnt about being a mom, I learnt from her. And I mean it in all good ways. 

The biggest and most important I learnt from her was to teach the kids by letting them see things for themselves and sharing that information. Now, they call it Experiential Learning. Every year, during every long vacation, we spent a week at the beach. On one of those occasions, during low tide, we found 2 dead horse-shoe crabs on the water line. (Side note: Can anyone remember why we called them King Crabs?). What my mother did was she showed it to me and explained all the different bits to me and then brought them home and dried them. Then she packed them up and sent me to school with it, with instructions to give it to my Science teacher. I cannot remember now what the teacher said to me but I do remember that right up till the point where I left primary Six, it was still in a display case outside the office. I felt proud of it every time I saw it and anytime I spotted people standing and looking at it, I would descend on them and explain everything, verbatim, to them. 

So my mother was big about Show and Tell even before there was show and tell. 

And because it's how I learnt, I have begun doing the same with the twins. I find little things that I think are interesting to the twins and I show it to them and let them bring it in. My latest was Kapok. There is a corridor of Kapok trees in the Botanic Gardens. For the uninitiated, Kapok is the local equivalent to cotton. It's from the pod that bursts. Once again, I remember this because my mom showed it to me when I was a little girl and pointed to a tree. 

Anyway, the ground was littered with cottony fluff but there was one intact with the segments of the pod still attached. I wanted the twins to see it. They love flowers, seeds, leaves and even rocks and roots. So I brought it home, albeit carefully. I didn't want the cottony, flyaway tuffs clinging to me and losing the general mass that was the exploded pod. 

The twins were fascinated. I had to stop Jordan from wanting to rub it on her face. Evan said it was as soft as Truffala Fruit. They learnt how to say the word "kapok", sound it out, I showed them the nursing pillow that my mom made when I had Muffin and told them that this was inside and they couldn't wait to bring it to school.

It made them very excited and it made me very happy because I could recall being their age and my mom doing the same thing with me. And all of a sudden, the concept of legacy became real to me because I was passing on and sharing with my children something precious that my mother had shared with me. And hopefully, the buck won't stop with them.

Technorati Tags: twins, learning, mothers

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Taking off the rose tinted glasses

Someone recently told me that she hated reading Mommy blogs. She complained it gave her esteem issues. All these mommies did was to blog about the beautiful stuff they would bake with their kids and how life all beautiful and they loved every second of every day as a mother. I assured her that we weren't all like that. In fact, I knew that I wasn't. It took me a long time find my Mommy groove and even now, I go through periods where I feel like I am a bad mom. 

Anyway, I wanted to write something where I told the truth. I don't think I have camouflaged the truth but blogging is about picking highlights and talking about. It's easy to not highlight the ugly bits or the bits that no one really wants to hear about. So anyway, here's what I go through in a typical day. 

I don't usually get to wake up after it is light because Muffin has a body clock of a school going child. He is up and chirpy at 6. He then potters round the house and waits for his siblings to get  up before descending upon them and depending on their morning mood, they either tumble into running amok around the house or screeching at each other like banshees. 

I try to remind myself that they are children and they will get up to shenanigans where they use scissors and cut confetti sized bits of paper and strewn them all over the house. I try to not swear when I step on matchbox cars and have them give way under my feet only to get berated by my son for spoiling his toys. 

Mostly, I am used to it and zen about it. But on occasion, it causes me to snap and I become a crazed, shouting mother. Nothing gets forgiven or swept aside. I go on a war path. 

Today was one of those days. The house was already a mess by 7 am and every room in the house was fully lit and the fans whirring. Muffin climbed onto my expensive aluminium clothes rack and bent a bar like he was the Hulk. The twins, for whatever  reason chose to think that everything that came out of Mommy's mouth could be ignored, so breakfast was half eaten for the longest time, the iPad was fought over as if it were the last electronic device on earth, my specific instructions to NOT use the pair of scissors was blatantly ignored. On top of that, there was whining to want to bring things like rulers and random pieces of paper and books to school, all to be done in the 5 minutes before the bus was due to pick them up. 

So something in me snapped and I start yelling. I yelled at them for making more work for me to do. I yelled at them for not listening to instructions. I threw down what I was carrying because it was easier for me to accede to the whining than to have her go on like a broken record. There have been times when I kept up the  yelling because at the back of my mind, I wanted to yell at them till they cried just because I was so frustrated with them. 

It is not a good side of me. But it happens. 

Often I am contrite about it and I remember the article I read some time ago " You just broke your child" and I wonder if they will be scarred by the times that they get yelled at by me. 

I wish I could say I had it all under control. I wish I could be the Stepford mom, beautifully groomed and not a hair in place. Most of the time, I would be lucky if my hair were in place and I didn't look like I just got out of bed. There have been days where there was so much handling of the kids to do in the morning, it is only at 10 am that I remember that I haven't yet brushed my teeth.. 

As a mum, I know I shout too much, I sweat the small stuff, I get worked up over things I have no control over and I make a big deal out of everything.  When I was sick recently and I lost my voice, Jordan took to reminding me that I couldn't scold them because I had no voice. I think they actually enjoyed the silence and my lethargy which led me to just plop them in front of the televisioin. 

The truth is there are probably more days like that then days where I am totally in love with my kids and want more kids. It is the rare day or hour where my heart soars for every moment that I am with them. I remember thinking about my own mother that it was weird how she could be so affectionate to me in the morning but constantly scolding me the rest of the day.

I do however, regardless of how angry and frustrated I am with them, I do try to make it a point to tell them that I still love them and that no matter how angry I am with them, that doesn't lessen. 

The grand mess in the house that leaves me stepping on matchbox cars and tripping over boxes. 

Technorati Tags: parenting, motherhood

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Parent Teachers Meeting

Being teachers, both Packrat and I look at Parent-Teachers Conferences for our children as a little bit of a minefield and regard it with not just a little bit of irony. This is because of all the nasty thought bubbles that have appeared in our heads over the umpteenth parent teacher conferences that we have had to sit through as teachers. We are well-aware of the self-imposed, for the sake of self-preservation, gag order that prevents us from saying what we truly think about some of the students that we have taught over the years.

Because of that, when the twins started school and we had to start meeting their teachers, we faced it with a great amount of reading between the lines; using on teacher lexicons to fish out possibly negative things about our children. Did 'independent learner' really mean that our kids were anti-social? Did 'easy going disposition' equate to down-right lazy?

Thankfully, the twins didn't require euphemisms to be used. We were told that Jordan would sometimes wander into her own little world and it took various rounds of calling her to extract her from it. We were told that Evan would whine a little bit if he felt he wasn't given enough time at the Learning Centres (areas in the class marked for them to play learning games). All in, we are thankful our twins are well-behaved and polite in school, they are friendly and socialise well with others.

What stood out for each of them was very different, however and it served to highlight how different these two, who spent a good 37 weeks gestating together within me, are.

For Evan, the highlight of this year's Parent Teacher Conference was when I was talking with his Math teacher and she said that he had an inclination for Math. I added that it was very amusing that he was tossing addition sums at me to do while we were in the car, as if he were testing me. His teacher was very pleased and announced that he would be well ready for addition next term. To which, I gazed with her slightly uncomprehendingly and the ensuing exchange still sends me into chuckles as I write it today.

Me: "You mean you haven't done addition?"
Teacher: "Nope."
Me: "Then how did he figure it out?"
Teacher: "I thought you taught him".
Me: "I thought YOU taught him"

Then silence, as both of us were a bit awestruck by a not yet five year old who seemed to have taught himself to add and was also well on the way to teaching himself how to tell time. I am thankful for that because, then one day, he can figure out those scary Math modals that are far beyond my ability and teach it to me and also his sister and little brother. I will probably pay him in Angry Birds time and he will be most obliging.

Then there was Jordan. Jordan, I fear will always be a little bit in the academic shadow of her brother. As her teachers point out, she is intelligent in her own right. And she is learning things that an average four year old is learning and probably doing it a bit faster than most. But the problem is that she has a brother, younger by 2 minutes who has leap-frogged his age group and about to blast holes in string theory or something similar. But the good thing is that she is a girl and he is a boy. I am not being sexist here but it means that they don't have to share the same school and she came emerge as her own person. That, we are seeing quite clearly as well.

Her teachers were full of praise of her drawing ability. She doodles, she draws all over her workbooks. The only time she isn't drawing is if she is watching television or chasing her two brothers up and down the corridor. And she draws stuff quite impressively. That we always knew. What her teacher pointed out that we didn't know was that Jordan had the ability to improvise in her drawing. She wasn't just doing a good job copying other images she saw. She was copying, making changes according to her own imagination.

When asked why this fish looked upset, she told me that it  was because she had forced the fish to spit out her Papa. For full story, please check here.

Now,that  made both Packrat and my jaw dropped. For me, it was because I came from a background of having failed art exams and my mother forcing me to practice still life painting as if it were piano scales. For Packrat, I think it was a great amount of pride. He was afterall, President of the Art Club and spent his life doodling too.

But that was not what pleased us the most. What did that was having the teachers rave about how heartwarming it was that the twins were so close to one another, looked out for each other and seemed overjoyed at the end of each school day to be reunited with one another. We were also told that they were very proud of one another and would introduce each other to their own teachers. It is my greatest wish that they continue to be like that.

One of the teachers asked me what I wanted her to do more with the children. My response stunned her. I told her I didn't have KPIs (Key Performance Indicators- Civil Service Speak!) for them. All I wanted was that they were helped along where they were weak and encouraged further where their strengths were. When I asked her why she looked so surprised, she told me that the other parents had requested very tangible things like having their children able to multiply up till 12 by K2! I assured her I wasn't expecting that because I wasn't sure if I could multiply up to 12 mentally myself at this point!

So, what we took away from this was that our kids are doing well in school and they have gifts in different areas. And how did we feel about it? We felt pretty damn proud of them for growing differently and special in their own ways.



  Technorati Tags: parent-teachers conference, Being teachers

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Not to be two ships in the night.

As I was growing up, my parents' marriage almost disintegrated before my eyes. It was a train wreck you could see coming, there was nothing to do to avoid it but to pick up the pieces of it after. And everyone did. Everyone helped. I understood then why it almost fell apart and I understand it even better now; now that I am married and have 3 kids of my own.

One thing that stood out during that time was my mother saying, to I cannot remember who, that the only thing she and my father did together was to go to market and that was about an hour a week. And even then, they would head in separate directions as they tried to cover as much ground as they could in an hour.

Then, a friend who was much older told me before I got married that whatever it was, I had to put my husband in front of my children. I heard the same message from our counsellors at marriage preparation as well.

It has been something that Packrat and I knew we wanted to always do even before we had the twins. And we have tried to do it ever since. Granted, it is becoming increasingly difficult with three children; two of whom now have academic needs that I have to tend to. At the end of the day, I don't want to go out, I don't want to talk  and I don't want to have sex. All I want to do is tune the world out, spouse included, and sleep.

As mums, our days just blend into a big blur of picking up kids, doing kids stuff; discipline, play, tending to them when sick. Inadvertently, when Packrat comes home, that is all we talk about. I have lamented on occasion, mostly weekends that even when we are together, we aren't quite. Exchanges are often "will you help Evan with this?" or "Can you please break up that fight?" with no connection and nothing personal or intimate. Some weekends, we forget to even kiss.

Late at night, after a long stretch of this, I lie in bed and worry about the state of my marriage. How can I be married to this man if I haven't actually said a word to him? He is just my partner in parenting. Thankfully, he knows that is about the point to spirit me off for date night or lunch or whatever, where it is just us and the unspoken rule is that we do not talk about the children.

Many mommy friends I know express envy that we do this and there have even been some who have implied that we are bad parents because we, on a yearly basis, dump our children for a period between 3 to 10 days and go off on an extended date night without kids. I do feel very guilty leaving my children behind especially now that they know how to lay on the guilt. And Muffin whose plaintive cry for Mommy tears right to my very core. But I once heard my sister-in-law tell her daughter "Mommy needs to spend some time with Daddy because Daddy is important too and misses me too". It is a message that both Packrat and I feel is important that our children learn. That while we love them very much and would go to the ends of the world for them, they are a product of our love and we need to nurture that love as well.

I found myself telling a friend today that I was at the age where I was beginning to hear the rumblings of marriages breaking down and spouses straying. Was it something I worried about? I would be lying if I said I didn't worry about it. No matter how much I feel I trust Packrat, I will always fear. It has alot less, I suspect, to do with him and a lot more to do with where I came from. And knowing how it has shaped me as a person and affected my relationships, it is even more reason to never have to put my children through those insecurities.

The problem is that falling out of love and growing apart happens almost insidiously. The neglect, the lack of attention, the attending to all the other more important things in a day; it sets us adrift. Even among friends that we don't make an effort to keep in touch with, we lose touch. What more our spouse?

Some have said that it isn't that they want it this way. It is a situation forced by circumstance. And in that way, I have been fortunate and spoilt because I get to choose to spend time with my husband. But at the end of the day, it isn't about going on vacation just alone with Packrat (although that is always nice), it's about carving out time for him and being there as if there were nothing else in the world that mattered.

I write this not just for my children, although it would be nice when they were older, for them to read why Mommy and Papa sometimes dropped them off at Grandma's and went away for a few days. I actually write it to remind myself; that I am not just Mommy to 3 demanding children but I am also my husband's best friend and when the kids are grown and moved out, I would like to still know how to talk to him and be with him.

Behaving like kids ourselves.

  Technorati Tags: marriage, parenting

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Eco Warriors

While we were out one day, Evan wanted to take a brochure that was placed outside a learning centre. I warned him not to. Naturally, he demanded to know why he couldn't take that piece of paper. I stopped and told him that by taking that piece of paper, he was contributing to there being less trees in the world and if there were less trees in the world, the world would be hotter and the air would be less clean.

A parent walked by as I told Evan and Jordan this. He stared disapprovingly at me. And turned to his wife and muttered something about it all being about a piece of paper and why I didn't just let my kid take the piece of paper. After all, it was just a piece of paper.

The problem is that to me, it isn't. Just like a bowl of shark's fin isn't just a bowl of shark's fin, it's a shark that drowned and died for it. My mother said that from a young age, I was like that. And it all started with me asking her why the trees were moving so much in the rain. Her answer was that the trees were happy because the rain was washing off all the dirt off its leaves and if the trees were happy, we'd be happy because they breathed in all the smelly air and produced oxygen for us. Thereafter I, although I do not remember this one bit, marched up to some workers on the street who were pruning trees and scolded them for killing the tree.

I think that little girl still exists in me and now that I am a mother, my voice is more strident and my soap box has a grand reach of 3.

Do the children get it?

Slowly they are. They remember the Truffala trees from the Lorax when they want to take a brochure. They know that electricity comes from burning oil and there is very little oil in the world. They also know that they are not supposed to just throw away things when they are broken, not before they try try try again to fix it.

Will it make a difference?

I don't know. I know my campaigning against sharks' fin and recycling falls to deaf ears a lot in the family. I am not entirely sure that I have been forgiven for not having sharks' fin at my wedding but it doesn't really stop me. If no one listens, at least I am not adding to the problem.

And to me, I got to at least teach my kids that much.

So going to the beach was about playing in the water and on the sand but it was also about picking up rubbish on the beach and dumping it all into the bin.

A nice long empty stretch of beach just for JE (D refused to be even carried onto the sand)

A mermaid being washed up to shore. 

      

Discovering that the sand could be divinely cool in the shade. 

Evan actually said it was fun and it was teamwork. I liked that he said that. 

Jordan: Naughty people throw things on the sand and Jordan has to pick them up!

They still get a lot of fun out of it and I hope it remains this way long enough for this to become second nature to them. Meanwhile, more trips to the beach! To the joy of everyone except for Muffin who hates it with a vengeance!

Technorati Tags: pre-schoolers, Saving the Earth

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Muffin Update

Muffin is out of hospital. He was discharged after spending not one, but two nights in hospital. For the record, I don't ever want to do that again.

Anyway, he seems about 90% back to normal now. 90% because he still throws up occasionally and is massively cranky. His behaviour has altered a little bit since discharge. He seems more proned to tantrums and mega- feature on Super Nanny- type tantrums with the flailing arms and kicking legs. Part of me doesn't want him to get away with it but part of me gets that it's probably has to do with having been teethered to a bed for 2 days in a room without windows. That would drive anyone a little bit cranky and proned to tantrums. But when he kicks me so hard in the mouth that I actually ran my tongue over my teeth to make sure all were there, I am less inclined to be so understanding.

He has also taken to boycotting vegetables. From a boy who would gulp down anything in his soup, he has become, over the course of a few days, finicky about what gets put into his mouth. Every single, chopped up strand of vegetable gets meticulously picked out of his mouth and into our hands.

Miserable and exhausted. 

Showing a bit more interest in Cartoon Network and a helium balloon. 

Being entertained by Up and off the drip finally!

The 2 days at the hospital where he pretty much got everything he wanted included television and Youtube round the clock has meant that we have a lot to undo now that he is home. It is a big battle especially coupled with his penchant for tantrums now and how tantrums ALWAYS make him throw up. 


But whatever it is, I am thankful that he is home. I would rather deal with whatever crap he is dishing out in order to express his utter displeasure at being hospitalised than to have him on a drip in a claustrophobic, cabin fever inducing room at the hospital.




Technorati Tags: toddler, hospitalisation

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