My Mother...

My mother would have been in her eighties if she were still to be alive today. She died in her early forties when I was only in secondary two of the boarding school in Ipoh. I was only 14 or 15 then...

How little I remember of her! I must have repressed most of my thoughts and feelings about her as I do not think that I went through the whole processes of grief when she died. She never told me that she was sufferring from cancer ( of the breast), and the whole family conspired to keep that information a secret from me ! I guess they all knew that I was a sensitive boy, an emotional kid who was still struggling to get used to being away from home.

It was my mother who first broke down at the time of seperation when I was left to be boarded at the residential school. Until then I was quite oblivious as to how painful a seperation could be. For months I used to weep in bed every night, missing my family and more specifically my mother. I would get very excited during every term break and my mother would never fail to cook my favourite dish (laksa kedah) during every holidays. And two or three weeks later, when the term break came to its end and it was time for me to return to the hostel, I would loose my appetite and become withdrawn and down again. That was what my elder siblings said about me..

My mother was a talkative lady with a warm and friendly character. With her short and rounded physique, she was the opposite of my asthenic and introverted father. My mother must have married very young, as my eldest brother is now already if not almost already seventy! So, she must have married in her late teens if not early twenties...

She bore the eleven of us in the family including a pair of twins who unfortunately did not survive the Japanese Occupation. And my mother did a great job of bringing all of us up to what we have become today...

She was always up early every morning and breakfast for the whole family would be on the table by the time we were up for school or whatever. I remember my regular breakfast would be a plate of fried rice some times eaten with a few fresh green chillies and dipped in thick sweet soya sauce (kicap), the fired rice was usually cooked from the balance of the rice from the dinner the night before. Only my father would have his two half-boiled eggs and toasts with his coffee.

On Saturday or Sunday mornings my mother would take me to the market to help her carry the basket of vegetables, fish or chicken that she would buy. And as I became familiar with her selection of food, whenever she was unwell to go to the market, I would be sent to do it with a list of stuff to buy. I would sometime help her out in the kitchen, picking the husks out from the rice, cutting the vegetables, cleaning the fish etc. As such I did not feel akward about helping out in the kitchen even up to until today. In fact, more often than not, nowadays, I am the one who does the marketing and sometimes the cooking for my family! It must have been my mother's influence..

It was my mother who taught me how to read the Koran. She would everyday devote the time between Maghrib and Isha to teach me how to read the Koran. Being a good student, of course, I had no difficulty mastering the skill. Furthermore, the only newspaper that was subscribed in the house was the Utusan Melayu. So that also helped in my mastery of the Jawi. But the daily contact with my mother over the Koran-reading sessions was an important aspect of my relationship to her which cemented the mother-son relationship.

My mother was a model of responsibility, loyalty and love to the family. She was there to see the whole lot of us through life but unfortunatley she did not live long enough to see all the fruits of her labour.