It was a Covid-19 project. During the pandemic years, my family would sometimes cycle to the beach near our home in the evenings and make a quick picnic out of dinner.
On one of those excursions, my daughters – then three and six – delighted in finding a snapped-off branch with leaves still attached to it. They dug a little hole in the sand, stuck the branch in it, and carefully doused it with water from their drinking bottles.
In the intervening years, we’d search for “our plant” when in the vicinity. “There it is,” the girls would sometimes say when they glimpsed a sapling, imagining that the branch had grown.
Later on, as they got older and busier, and my time got more compressed, we did not look for the plant as often any more, but it still looms large in our collective memories – a moment of no significance to others, but evocative of a certain time and place for us.
At the end of 2024, my family will be moving out of our home in Siglap, where we have been living for eight years and which is pretty much the only home that the girls, now six and nine, have known. We will be shifting almost halfway across the island to be closer to their school, so we are leaving not just the apartment but the entire neighbourhood and community.
When my husband and I decided on the move earlier this year, we quickly and decisively set things in motion, recognising the good sense that drove it.
Yet, in the months since, I have also found myself at times unexpectedly bowed by emotion at the prospect. At dinner with a good friend and current neighbour one night, I found myself tearing up in the restaurant as I spoke about the impending move.
What was I grieving for?
The music in the community
At work and even at home, much of my attention is turned outwards.
In a particularly hectic year of elections and hot wars around the world, my colleagues and I are constantly keeping abreast of fast-moving developments across different time zones, ranging from big-power rivalry to political polarisation, economic malaise, religious nationalism and disinformation campaigns – so that we can make sense of what is happening and why it matters to our readers in Singapore and South-east Asia.
It is exciting and meaningful work. But it can also be consuming. As The Straits Times US bureau chief Bhagyashree Garekar remarked during a recent work retreat back in Singapore, “you have to be a little in love with what you are doing” to constantly seek to understand the nuances of all that is unfolding.
To keep things on an even keel, I find myself hunkering down at home and in the neighbourhood during my spare time, seeking solidity in everyday life.
When someone asked me what I do for self-care, I replied that I enjoy going to the wet market every week in Marine Terrace.
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The reasons are twofold: For one, I reckon I am being somewhat productive even as I relax by buying fresh produce and flowers for the home.
But there is another factor at play: Over the years, I have struck up some sort of relationship with the vendors there.
The vegetable uncle knows that I am always on the lookout for Singapore-harvested vegetables and throws in some sprigs of spring onion or coriander. The flower auntie thrusts Cantonese mock-scoldings and packets of Yakult at my daughters. I exchange holiday plans with the fishball noodle uncle.
Our mutual dance of commerce has evolved, from the initial years of fumbling in wallets and fanny packs for banknotes and coins to a quick wave of the mobile phone as the QR code became ubiquitous in the market. Some were faster, others were slower, but everyone is now on board and I saw the market aunties and uncles grow, in that sense, as they saw my children grow.
On weekends, our family evening routines generally take one of the following two forms. We bike along the park connector – where both girls have learnt how to ride as we run and pant alongside them – to a nearby playground where children from nearby homes play grounders. Or we bike to Bedok Jetty, where taciturn fishermen oblige the girls with their many questions: “What did you catch? Is the fish dead? What are you going to do with it?”
We will miss them, as we will miss the friendly Burmese woman at the dry-cleaners in Frankel Avenue, the staff at a hipster bagel-and-records joint in Joo Chiat Road that once made my daughter’s day by playing her then favourite Beatles song over the speakers, and the Jalan Tua Kong coffee shop stall owners who helped me out when I urgently needed cash for a funeral wake – I PayLah-ed them in return.
Research has shown that eight out of 10 people apparently buy goods from their local business because of how that same business helped the community. That might be true, but I like to think that what is greasing these relationships is simply humanity.
Of course, at our new home, there will be new places to discover, new memories to make, new community relationships to build. It will just take time.
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I have wondered if what is really also happening is that I am grieving the passing of my children’s childhood, one associated with our current home.
Our older daughter is in the final months of her single-digit years, and the younger one is fast losing her babyishness as she prepares for primary school. While I try to live in the present, I sometimes pre-emptively don the armour of mentally girding myself for the future when they grow up and necessarily grow apart.
Parenting experts, in trying to offer exhausted parents of young children some perspective as they ride out the challenging period of herding little ones, warn that “the days are long but the years are short”.
I have found both the years and the days to be incredibly short.
Mixed into all of this is the seemingly inevitable guilt of being a working mother, one trying to juggle the many balls up in the air.
On one of my days off work this year, I walked our younger daughter to school instead of dropping her off on the way to the office. She is young enough to still find magic in the pathways, be it blowing on a lalang stalk or balance-walking on the ledges that line the street-side verges.
Midway, we found a snail across the pavement. We worried that someone was going to step on it, and tried to move it. But the creature simply would not budge and I gave up after a while. After taking a few steps, my daughter said: “Mama, let’s try to make it wet so the snail can walk.” She doubled back, splashed some water from her bottle on the snail and I moved it to the side with ease.
Having saved the world, or rather, a snail, we carried on.
Will such moments be gone, I think, allowing myself to be melodramatic. Have I given her enough of myself, at a time when she still wants me?
The answer is probably no. But I have also come to the conclusion that what I can give of myself – if I am not busy and am happy at work – is also not satisfactory.
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In trying to reframe my thinking, I have landed on the takeaway that what I am closing a chapter on is not so much my children’s childhood, but a specific idea I have had about the kind of mother I can or should be. A colleague, who is mum to a teenager, reassures me that my children will still need me, albeit in different ways.
While preparing for the move, we are sorting out our worldly possessions accumulated over eight years – from the massive amounts of artwork that the children did in their pre-school years to clothes now too tight, too faded, too faddish.
We are throwing out stuff and making space. A new home awaits.
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