316 - 1.9.26 - 16: Farewell to childhood

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I now have 2 grown up sons. I did more or less raise them on my own. As most mothers do. When I say on my own, I mean that when they came along, despite being highly educated and having jobs I loved, I had to make a choice: myself or my child. Really. I had to make a decision. And the litmus test for me always was, say, when my sons are now independent and decide to do things which are truly horrible, will I be able to look at myself in the mirror and say, actually, you know what, I did do my best. Given the information at the time and the resources I had, I did do my best. Of course I will love them till the end of time, no matter how horrible they are, but in the end, I do not want to look back and be filled with the 'I shouldas'.

Does Lawrence Wong know the amount of literal SACRIFICE that takes? Does he? A sacrifice which if you do not have a husband nor significant other who is switched on and a family which you have around to help you, will have you dig deep. Dig so deep that you will bleed. And you will choose to bleed because you have made a choice.

My sons still have ample time to fuck it up, but I have the You Tried Your Best insurance policy. I mean you REALLY FUCKING TRIED YOUR BEST. Being a mother is probably the most primal thing left to us now. No algorithm is going to pick your baby up in the middle of the night to nurse it, no app is going to love your child and teach it to be human, no url is going to tell you how to hold a boundary or a hurt so that sometime in the future they will understand that you were mum not pal not best friend not absent space. In the birth and the tears and the exhaustion and the weariness and the insistence and the responsibility you undertook the moment you chose to have the child, it is the longest, most difficult marathon of all time. It is walking on bloodied feet and soaring on winged sandals simultaneously.

It is hard hard hard hard hard. And to compound that, if you do choose to actually parent your child, not farm them out to someone else, then you have the INSANE Singaporean education system and weight of expectations to contend with. A system which paradoxically says have children, but also don't let them be children. Have them be cogs in a machine. Have them conform. To be productive. To refuse to allow them play because play, the bestest, most natural thing on the planet, is a waste of time. To choke them off at the time when they are most beautiful, free and poetic and put them into containers which they will scream and yell about until they give up and are subdued.

Is that the childhood which anyone would want for their child? No. So why would you have children? It's so heartbreaking. Singapore is not going to have more children at this rate, cos why would anyone have them? Like everything else, we can import things - we import our food, our culture, our art, our construction, our knowledge - we can just import our population. I think the government made its choice a long time ago.

Farewell to childhood Singapore - a real one. Or maybe, I think we said farewell to it a long time ago already.

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