I used to have my ears plugged with music all the time, I needed a soundtrack for every bus I took to work, for the way home, for every new station I wandered. I needed words to associate with every step of my life. Like a song about demons heaving on my shoulders when I didn't have the strength to get up anymore, or a song about daylight when I got married.
When he was born, I stopped relying on music. I started measuring time with his life, a week old, a month old, a year old. Two and a half years old. I have no songs associated with his first steps or words. From the moment he was conceived, I measured my birthdays with his existence, 26 and pregnant, 28 with a one-year-old, next year, 30 years old with a 3-year-old. I spend more time with him than my music or writing, and I have to tell myself I am mother first, writer second.
But maybe one day I can go back to my writing, in his independence and silence. When he will go to school on his own and I no longer have to hold his hand crossing the road. His father and I won't be the first thing he looks for in the mornings, maybe a phone or a cup of coffee instead.
But if I raise him right, he will still talk to me over the things in his hand. He will still talk to me about the cards he was dealt with, numbers on the front of tests or words a friend stabbed into his back. If I support whatever he does and comfort him with my kitchen humming when he comes home from school. The way my own mother was for me in my youth.
I always thought her nodding at my endless chatter was a sign of absence. But I grew older and she tells stories about me as a kid to my husband. And I am surprised to know she was there. She remembers my awards in primary school and friends from ballet, I'm sure she remembers every single time her 16-year-old daughter came home late without greeting her.
What she doesn't know is I remember everything she does too. I remember her bragging to my kindergarten teacher about me knowing the word 'astonishment'. I remember her praising the makeshift storybooks I made in primary school. I remember her listening to the speech I made at secondary 4 camp, and if she had kept it up afterward, I would remember her reading my scribbled poems and cryptic posts.
Now I get annoyed when she makes the entire family pose for a picture, not realising she is just trying to make memories the way I do. She is back to being happy whenever I visit, and just because of that I feel safe coming home to pasir ris again. And I want my children to feel this way with me even decades down the road. I want them to walk around their lives knowing I will always support whatever they do in the sweet nothing of my settling down.
Maybe they will turn out okay immediately, or maybe they will have to go through their own versions of 2012 and 2013 and 2014 and 2015 and so on,,, like I did, before they can come to the very moment in their version of 2024 where they realise... that they may not break the generational trauma after all... and maybe their child will still turn out to be the cursed way they did no matter how much they try.
Restart the never-ending cycle: 1. You're on your own, kid (2012)
