Story of a Mother on Mother’s Day

She was born in Melaka during the turbulent times of pre-independence Malaya (now Malaysia). Her family was very poor and she had to stop schooling in Primary 2 during the Japanese occupation. During those three years and eight months, she endured endless hunger and fear. Sweet potatoes were a daily staple. Every morning, she had to sing the Japanese anthem as the soldiers raised their flag. She had to salute to those soldiers when walking past them and as a young girl, she had seen that failure to give respect to those cruel soldiers could cost a limb or life.

After almost 60 years later, she could still vividly remember the harsh life in her early days. When the occupation ended with the surrender of Japanese forces in Asia, she was given away by her parents. This, she believed was because she was a girl and her family could not afford to feed everyone in the family. Gender discrimination or preference for males was deeply rooted in Chinese tradition in those days. She knew she had siblings but could no longer recall how many or their names. She considered her life much better in her new family. Though actually she was treated no better than a maid, at least she did not have to sleep going hungry or fear bombs falling from the sky.

When she reached her early teens, her adoptive family abandoned her at an orphanage in Ipoh. She was very sad, for her families have given up on her twice. Alone at the orphanage, she went through a very lonely childhood. At 18, she left the orphanage to work as a maid for a British lawyer and his wife. She worked for them for about 10 years during which she met her would be husband. He was a brother of her next door best friend, also a maid for a British household.

After her British employers left Malaysia (then Malaya) to return to England, she moved to Kuala Lumpur to work for another expatriate family to be closer with her would be husband who was already working as a carpenter in the capital. They had courted for more than 10 years in their whirlwind romance, constantly besieged by his womanizing ways. But she tolerated him because she was deeply in love him.

She married him in her late 30s and became a mother a year later. Thinking she had finally found the man of her life and a family of her own, luck was not on her side. She had to move back with her son to Ipoh to care for her husband’s aging parent. Her husband stayed back in Kuala Lumpur on the pretext to make a living, but actually he was engrossed with other women. As a father, he did not always send money home to his family. Even if he did send, it was never enough for her to make ends meet. She had to work as a cook and maid to support the family and taking care of her child.

She knew he had many affairs. She knew she had to share husband with other women while she slept alone. How she can endure the constant betrayals and feeble lies was indeed incomprehensible.

It was because of her love for her son she had not confronted him of his affairs. Undeniably, she still loved him. She rather suffers in silence. She sacrificed her happiness to keep the family together, in the hope that one day he would change and stop his philandering ways.

One day, the affairs did stop.

That fateful day he was killed in a tragic accident. She was devastated. She had thought that even though she grew up in an orphanage, at least now she had a family but she is now lonely again. She felt she was being abandoned again like her families. Her son was only 7 years old at that time and was too young to understand the meaning of the death of his father.

But he knew he would never see his father again.

He knew his mother was very sad, he heard her crying silently every night after the death of his father. Her selfless love for her husband was unreserved and unconditional. Not too long after, she was diagnosed with ovarian tumour and she had to undergo surgery. Those were the most painful moments in her life as all unfortunate events happened in less than a year. After the death of her husband, her husband’s relatives began to treat her poorly. She was a widow with a child. They thought she could never be able to support herself unless she remarries and they looked down on her.

But she never remarried to this day.

She did not give up on life. She painfully tolerated her husband’s rude relatives to put a roof over her son’s head. She pull herself together and worked extra hard to support her son. She took him to school on a bicycle and rush to work. After school, she picked him up again and took him back to her work place until she finished her work. After work, she had to cook dinner and finish the house chores. It was a very trying time for her but she never whined nor complained.

Carrying her son on her bicycle, they braved the rain or shine. There were times when they had fallen down slippery roads. Both mother and son embraced each other in pain, drenched in the rain. Even when she was sick, she forced herself to work to feed her child. But when her son was sick, she did not hesitate to take leave from her demanding employer to care for him.

When her son was older, she persuaded him to move to Kuala Lumpur for a college education. Despite having little savings, she never compromised on her son’s education. She borrowed from friends to finance his studies. She skimped and saved her meagre salary for his living expenses. Very often she did not have a decent meal, salvaging leftover food from her work place or just having biscuits or bread.

She had worked more than 10 hours a day everyday for almost 50 years of her life before she called it a day. Even that was on the insistence of her grown up son. To her, her son was everything in her life. And he knew she was sacrificing for him to get a decent education, a better future.

Throughout his younger days, his mother taught him the virtue of being humble, being responsible and hardworking. She constantly inculcated her son the important values of respecting women, a value which her husband sorely lacked. Although she was born in to poverty and led a hard life, she was always a bright and optimistic woman. She never believed in giving up. When her son grew up, he inherited these noble values of life from her.

Once, he had asked his mother why she did not find love and remarries again. She just smiled and kept silent. But her son knew she had sacrificed her happiness for him. He knew she was a traditional woman of virtue and old values. He knew his mother still had feelings for his father. But above all, she was a selfless and devoted mother. To this day, she never once whined nor complained about her harsh life. But whenever her husband was mentioned, tears would well up her eyes.

She is a miracle, a mother of amazing love and strength.