Couple of weeks ago, my son came with me to shop at Costco. I need his help to push the trolley.

When we were at the till, the check out chick was literally flirting with my son.

It started out with my son telling her “ola” ( He finds it really interesting to say Ola, instead of Hello to cute girls)

“Oh, you speak Spanish?” She asked him. Turns out she is from Peru.

She commented on his beautiful long eye lashes, his beautiful smile and what a wonderful son he is to accompany his mom and helping her when she does grocery shopping.

What I really wanted to do was to bop her on her head. This is my 14 year old son we are talking about here. He is MY baby..mine..

All that she said was true. He does have beautiful long eye lashes, he does have a beautiful smile and he always help me when I need help.

But, but, but.. so many buts were rolling out of my brain..

You see, we reached that cross road..me having to let him go.

I thought letting Yaya go was tough.. it turns out letting your son go is even more harder..

My baby would have been 18 years old today.

This happened while Yaya and I were in India. We were waiting for my friend to fetch us  at the jewellery shop where Yaya had her nose pierced.

Yaya has zero pain tolerance and every time the guy came with the piercing gun she shrieked and jumped off the chair. Soon we amassed a decent amount of spectators. Eventually she calmed down ( after a lot of prep talk from your truly) and got the job done. As she had an episode of syncope ( fainting spell), I didn’t want her to get up right away. So I asked the shop attendant “is it ok, if we waited in the shop till my friend arrives?” And she said “ok”

Afs we were waiting, Yaya looked at me and said ” I love you Mom, thank you for being the best”

One of the spectator was a woman of my age and I noticed her looking at me with surprise when Yaya told me I love you. She then asked me “How do you get your daughter to say I love you?”

I told her ” it is very simple, I tell them I love you few times a day. Every morning before they leave for school, I tell them  Have a super day at school and I love you,  Every phone call ends with I love you. Every goodnight ends with I love you.

A ( mallu) friend who was born and raised in UK once told me that he asked his father ” Why you never once told me “I love you” like my friends parents?” And his father replied ” Our love is in our hearts, you can’t show what is in our heart” He told me that he grew up thinking his parents never loved him.

It really is not hard to say I love you to your children. Say I love you, because they need to hear it, not just feel it.

My children have school holidays and have been spending a lot of time at my friend K’s house. ( the one who took 10 years to finish medicine). Each evening when I pick them up, I ask “So what did you have for lunch?”

Before I proceed, I must tell you that I always felt that children must eat  three proper meals ( breakfast, lunch and dinner) and spend a considerable amount of my  time and money to follow that notion.

Most of the days, my kids had a smoothie for lunch( which they made by themselves), occasionally a snag on a slice of bread or a salad. Kids swim in the pool, go to the park and play soccer etc and when they are hungry, they go to the kitchen and make themselves a smoothie and they are all happy. My friend took time off from work  and caught up on  her reading:) instead of slogging in the kitchen. This was something I could never do. I would feel guilty if I had not cooked a proper lunch/dinner.

Perhaps, I got it all wrong. I was sweating for the small stuff.

Sometimes you learn how much better your children are compared to you

Like me, my children love music. Yaya has been collecting music from grade 4. She now has few thousand songs on her external hard drive. Most of the songs are from Library CD’s that she borrows and copies. Her brother being the lazy person wants to borrow Yaya’s external hard drive and copy the songs instead of going to the library and go through all those hassles. Yaya has been adamant that it is her collection, she worked hard to get them and is not willing to share it with her brother. I find that attitude appalling.

For me, it is just songs and there is no harm in sharing them. If we are going to demand proprietary rights to everything because we worked hard, then this world is going to be one tough place to live.

So, few days ago, while my son  and I were in Yaya’s room  ( we always play some pranks on Yaya  every time she goes on long trips, this time we decided to use post it notes to decorate her entire room) I noticed her external harddrive on her table.

I told my son

“You should download the songs, before your sister returns”

He shook his head and said “No Mom, That is not ethical, she told me she doesn’t want to share the music and I accept her decision, I don’t want to cheat her”

Moments like this are the most precious..

Yaya still has few stuffed animal from her childhood. One of which is a Furby.

It was about 6 months after we arrived in Vancouver, we were living in a 2 bedroom basement suite, I had no job and the money that I brought with me from Malaysia was fast disappearing and I had 4 more years to go through before I could get Canadian citizenship.

Prior to coming to Vancouver, my children never knew the word ‘suffering’. That is not the right word, but in this context it is. The clinic I used to do locum was in a shopping mall and there was a toys r us outlet inside. Every evening after work, I went to toys r us and bought new toys. Most evenings we went out for dinner and I remember taking my children to Midvalley mall in KL every Sunday because only they had a Barney ride on toy ( you pay a dollar and sit inside and the machine moves while singing a song !)

And moving to Vancouver and all of a sudden find ourselves with no money was a huge shock to my children and me.

And then my neighbour’s children got a Furby as a gift. They would come to my house with the Furby and play and every time my children asked if they could have a go, they wouldn’t let them. One night, Yaya came to me with her siblings and asked ” Mom, Can you please get us a Furby?” ( This is the same child who walked to school with wet shoes and didn’t tell me because she knew I couldn’t afford new shoes) I didn’t say “no, you can’t have one because we can’t afford” and I didn’t say yes either.

That night as I went to bed, I remembered the amount of toys, I have thrown away before we moved to Vancouver. I did wonder if my current state was  some sort of Karma returning the favor?

The next day, after school, children and I went to Canadian superstore. It was a long walk and  we went to the toys section. There on the shelf was the ugliest toy I have ever seen, Furby, grey colour body with humongous eyes. It was 37$. I explained to my children that I know how much they wanted to own one. But buying this means, we will have to reduce our grocery shopping. They nodded their head. After buying the Furby, I walked back home with three happy kids, who took turns to hold the Furby. I told them, they look like the three wise men holding the gold, frankincense and Myrr.

Neighbour’s kids stopped coming to my house with their Furby, the moment they saw that my kids too have a Furby. And my own kids stopped playing with the Furby, two days after we got it. And every chance I got, I sang “there goes my 37 dollars” in the tune of there goes my baby..and my kids knew why I was singing it. But after that, they never asked me for something because someone else had it. Because for one, they know I will sing ‘there goes my 37 $’ and I guess it is also because they know that I always came though solid when they needed me the most.

Sometime ago, Yaya heard from one of her classmates that a restaurant near our home is hiring wait staff. She printed her resume and asked me if I could drive her to the place, which I did.

“Aren’t you coming with me?” She asked.

“Nope” I replied. “You will have to do this on your own”.

“But, Mom, I don’t know what to do” She replied.

“Well, it is not a big deal. All you are going to do is to walk in to the restaurant, find the manager, introduce yourself and tell him/her that you are interested in working there and hand in your resume. I know you can do this”

I felt end of next year she will be in Uni and will have to do this by herself and it is better that she learns to do all this herself.

She looked stressed and I was tempted to go with her, but I didn’t. Eventually she got out of the car and went to the restaurant and handed in her resume. Few days later I got a frantic call from Yaya telling me that she received a txt from the restaurant and they want a trial that day from 5 to 8 pm. Yaya had afterschool work that day and wouldn’t have made it to work on time if she was going to take the public transport. So I offered to pick her up from the school and drive her to work. I  bought a box of chocolate for her, knowing very well that she is stressed, hungry and tired and the best remedy  is a box of chocolates. She ate all the chocolates. I also took a scrunchie for her hair because I know wait staff must tie their hair. She thanked me for remembering the scrunchie. As she got out of the car she said “Mom, I am scared”

And I replied “that is a natural feeling. Remember the worst that can happen is you don’t get the job, but it is still not the end of the world. You give your best shot and I am proud of you”

She got the job !

While I was doing second year Pre-degree, I had to apply to various medical college to do MBBS. I have no idea what I had to write in those application forms, because I didn’t fill them myself. My sister was working in Trivandrum at that time and my mother send me to her with all those forms, which she filled and I returned home in the evening. The irony is that if I was going to do Medicine, 5 years from that day, I would have been working as a doctor, yet I wasn’t considered matured enough to fill in the application by myself to become a doctor. And the worst is, I was so ill prepared for my interview and sat like a deer in the headlight in front of the college Principal while my sister and my uncle answered all the questions on my behalf. Instead of filling the application for me, which I could have done by myself, I wished my family had prepared me for the interview.

Yaya is in Mexico right now. She packed her bag, did the online check in and all I had to do was to drop her at the airport. She didn’t want me to wait till she cleared the immigration and shooed me away.

She didn’t send an email or a txt to let me know she arrived in Mexico. I would have love to know about her host family or her new school.

I send her a message on FB wishing her good luck on her first day of school. I wrote “Darling, good luck with your first day of school and here is hoping that you will get to meet  lots of hot guys”

What I really wanted to do was to scold her for not keeping me updated, but she is my child and I hate having to answer/explain to anyone. So I wrote what I hoped would elicit a response from her. True enough, she responded “Thanks Mom, I love you, I am so nervous” And I replied “All will be well and be good”

From now to the day she leaves Mexico, I don’t expect any more messages from her. Unless of course she runs out of money. I do worry about her. But what I know is that, she is smart and independent and that she won’t be like a deer in the headlights like her mother was.