Strange Machines

My 100 year old grandmother, fiesty as a whip in her day, succumbed to organ failure from advanced pancreatic cancer, and passed away peacefully on Friday with her family around her.

Just one week ago she was lucid enough to recognise and smile at me but last Wednesday she was out of it, dazed from the morphine administered to ease her pain.

She was on oxygen when we went to say our farewells and took her last breath only after my sister and her family arrived, as if she was waiting for all of us to gather to send her off.

She was a titan in her time and we all admired her for her strength, her love, and her steely will to survive. Rest in peace, Mama. It was one helluva ride.

My Grandma has been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. I hope she will feel the love and comfort we bring to her in her final days. She’s lived 99 years. I hope she will see 100.

I must confess first. I was a TV addict.

After work, dear hubby and I would cuddle up in from of ole Faithful and watch our fave programs like CSI and munch on junk food. I could not live without TV.

Fast forward to year 2006 and Jack was born. I read that the cost of watching TV was the opportunity lost spent on other more creative and productive things like reading, playing, or talking to Mom. According to many peer-reviewed studies, kids who watch TV have less vocabulary than kids who don’t, and the latter are more sociable.

I was sold. I swore my kid would never watch television. Ever. And I had to set an example. The TV became a glorified plant holder and took up half the space of the living room. Surprisingly I found life without TV pretty alright, since we were busy with the kids and really have no more free time. I do fantasize about the days when the kids are off to college and I can finally turn on my 35″ TV and watch all the dramas I missed in the last 18 years.

As for the old clunker, we gave it away to an elderly neighbour who was thrilled to have it. She was retired and watching TV every day on a tiny 20″. We figured that by the time the kids were old enough to watch TV, our CRT would have decomposed and we could get a brand new plasma t.v. for $200. And let’s make it a Samsung plasma tv or a Panasonic plasma tv.

And is there credence to all the reports about increased sociability and higher vocabulary? According to people who have met Jack, he is very sociable with people of all ages and speaks non-stop like a Duracell bunny.

I don’t know about other children, but after 3.5 years of no TV, Jack isn’t fond of watching it and he would prefer to play or read than watch TV. He went through a brief phase of TV phobia, probably from something he saw on it at Grandma’s house. But he sat through The Lion King (his cousin was watching at Grandma’s) just last week (which from a child’s eyes, seems awfully negative about brotherhood and rather pro-revenge and violence). His first actually.

According to the scientifically-based Nurtureshock, kids pick up extracts from a story, so even if a story with conflict that gets resolved at the end, the child may simply pick up the conflict and not the resolution.

We can’t shelter our children from the media – heck I want my TV back one day – but the first few years are crucial to protect them from the effects of the media, much of which we as adults are already immune to or unaffected by. But children are vulnerable and judging from our viewing of the “children’s movie” The Lion King, I won’t be letting Jack watch any more till he is much older.

Sometimes we’re so busy cataloguing our lives, we forget to live in it.

I’ve been thinking very seriously about homeschooling the children. Today I bumped into my friend Maggie and her family and her 11 year old son told me that he was smarter before he started school. His mom and I agreed on that sentiment. There was a quote by this famous guy and I can’t for the life of me remember at this hour who and what, that said something about how the more education one had, the more narrow one’s mind. I gotta look that up.

The point of education is to inspire a child to learn, to love learning. If he or she ends up hating a particular subject, then it is most likely that the teacher had failed to inspire learning but instead caused the opposite, which is very unfortunate. It happened to me and I went to a supposedly good (but not too academically inclined) mission school. One teacher called us stupid and our form teacher even told the class we would never end up in junior college (most did, by the way).

Fortunately for me, once I left school, I began to love learning again. I’d scour through books on physics and mathematics and wish I understood them better, thanks to wonderful general science authors like Paul Davies who made complex concepts easier for the layperson to understand. I want the kids to love learning. Once they do, they have it set. They will teach themselves whatever they are interested in and no teacher in the world can ruin that for them.

Where to start? I really have no idea. I don’t personally know anyone who homeschools and I read somewhere in the local paper that homeschooled children are placed on a lower priority than schooled children should they wish to enter secondary school. Basically they’d have to score a lot higher than the usual requirement.

Then there is online homeschooling.

There is always the option to homeschool online. Pick up a curriculum and follow it. Utilise a Global student network. How hard can it be to teach it to the children, at their own pace? Teach the kids on the go, like I do now, with some activity books instead of sitting in a classroom. Teach them biology at the zoo or physics at the Science Centre. It would be an inspiring thought.

Ridiculous notions I’ve heard this past month about pregnancy and child rearing:

1. Breastfeeding past the age of 1 will cause an Oedipus complex.

Wow, there must be many mothers and sons having sex now because the sons were breastfed past 1! Seriously, all documented cases I’ve read of incest involves relatives who DID NOT grow up and/or live together from birth.

2. Drinking cold water will make the baby cold.

Right and drinking hot soup will burn the child.

3. Exposing a pregnancy belly is disgraceful for a mother.

But a fashion consultant told me it is chic to do so!

4. 2 year old children need to be toilet trained whether or not they are ready for it.

Tons of research show they are not physiologically ready till 3 and the best way to toilet train is for them to be ready.

5. Children must be fat to be healthy (and hence are overfed).

We already have enough problems with obesity so I wish purporters of this notion will just read some research articles and get a clue. Just because a child is genetically slim and active doesn’t mean he doesn’t eat. He grazes, just like Dr Sears recommends. Smart kid. He’ll never be fat.

6. Children need to be dressed to look as old as they can be.

Children are only small once. Why force them to look old prematurely?

7. Mothers are not entitled to personal time.

This one probably irks me the most. People decline to help or worse, criticise very disparagingly when a poor mother stays up for a few hours after baby sleeps for some personal time, and looks rather tired the next day (we look tired every day!) because they think stay home moms should be on call 24/7 but even maids get a day off sometime! And they get to sleep through the night.

That’s all I can recall for now. You can tell I’ve been hearing these a lot. Feel free to add, and to point and laugh.

I am convinced my creativity is absolutely random. It comes and goes like an absent-minded house guest who has a skeleton key to my home.

Just one week ago I was raring to make miniature houses. A month ago I was making plush rabbits as fast as they reproduce in real life.

From 2002-2004 I wrote 5 poems every day without fail. My muse was in overdrive. I wrote like I was on fire.

In 2005, it ebbed to 5 a month and I discovered World of Warcraft and joined Sulake. All my creative energy was channelled to my job.

Then I got pregnant and in 2006 gave birth to my best creation (hang on, hubby wants to claim credit too) yet, my sweet son Jack.

And today I feel like making nothing at all. In fact online retail therapy seems to be the order of the day.

I’ve always been a writer since I wrote my first poem at 5. It rhymed. That was about it. Then came the stories in high school, written in boring classes and later passed around my friends to read like a guilty trashy novel. All horror and science fiction, of course, with a touch of innocent teenage romance. I still have them!

I don’t know why I stopped writing.

Maybe it was the blast of creative energy I needed to inject for work. Maybe I had run out of tales to tell. Maybe I had exhausted all my angst and rage, now immortalised into those poems. The demons are all gone now. Poetry was therapy for me. A catharsis. And it was wonderful, so wonderful to be acknowledged by my peers for it.

Still, I took a ten year break from poetry when I first began at 5. Then I started again at 15 (yup, all that teenage angst in rhyme), began again at 29. Furiously. Maybe in another decade I will start again. Or maybe earlier if I gather up the 10 thousand words of The Flame and try to beat it into something worth reading.

I have spent the past few years reading. A new mother’s witching hour hobby. There are many new stories in me. The amazing real ones and those fantastic ones which entrap you between words.

Perhaps when Jack sleeps through the night I will begin. As with every journey, every story begins with a single word.

Our world is becoming increasingly fractured.

Humans, social animals by nature, are sequestered from the better world by crazy work hours, social obligations (not usually for pleasure, or so it seems), and an idle inquiry in the unimportant (aka TV).

People are turning to counsellors to their problems. Few have time to listen and few feel compelled to open up to their friends, especially if they haven’t spent enough time nurturing their friendships with work hours getting ridiculously longer. And those are the lucky ones. Many turn to drink or worse vices. Heck if you need to find someone to talk to in person, check out a Counseling Services List or a Counseling Services Directory.

A friend of mine once said, if you want a happy life, move to Australia where people finish work at 4 or 5, have time for outdoor activities, their families, have barbecues with friends and overall, lead a more peaceful life. You can actually have a family life.

And it is true. Friends of mine there are happily taking at least a year off to nurture their children. Fathers have time to spend with their children. They live in a nice house with a garden (with actual grass). No one feels hurried or caught in a rat race to compete.

Here, we’re in the thick of it. But it is possible to live in the rat race but not compete. What is a rat race but an unending loop which no one ever wins. Heck even Bill Gates got toppled with Warren Buffett (my idol) this year. It is possible to exist in the system but live out of it. And believe me, we are much happier than when we were both working and getting home at 9-10pm every night.

We don’t go to fancy restaurants, drive a fancy car, buy that spanking new condo, or buy any branded stuff. Everything’s made in China nowadays anyway – what’s the difference but the tag? My $3 Old Navy tee feels more comfortable than the $50 (see I can’t even remember the brand) top I bought years ago on sale. Plus, having modelled before, I am used to people paying me to wear their label, not me pay for their label and wear it for them all the time!

Good quality food and books are what we spend our money on, as well as paying off our home and car. The rest, we spend with family and good friends. Jack changed it for us. We want a better world for him. A better life. A happy life. Children do that I think. He has changed us for the better.

I try to cook more, to create a sweet family environment for Jack to grow up in. To remember his Mom in the kitchen cooking for him, Dad coming home to hug and kiss him. Us having dinner and talking together. Mom and Dad reading to him, sharing a cuddle before bedtime. Those are the things I want him to remember. A loving happy home.

It has been a privilege to be born. The longer I have lived, the more grateful I am to my parents for having had me. For as mortality too quickly looms and the veil of invulnerability falls, death becomes a true reality for those who once thought it myth.

How quickly life passes by. Moments come and go like road runners, racing to make the next memory. I can hardly keep up anymore. My journals are full and then emptied. Each day I struggle to encapsulate the highlights and savour them.

For so many, life is over in an instant.

A male calf born to a milk cow, torn from its mother at birth, kept in a cold dark tiny crate for a month alone without food to tenderise its flesh, and then slaughtered to make veal. What sort of life is that? It has never known the warmth and love of its mother, who will lose many more children this way to meet the demands of humans who drink their milk.

Small kittens never asking to be born are born, then thrown into a sack to be discarded, taken away to be gassed, or worse, clobbered to death, just because their mother’s human owners decided not to neuter her and let her wander outside to be impregnated.

Human children born in places where there is no food, no clean water, no medicine. They cling onto their starving mothers as flies buzz around their faces, vultures, undeterred.

Then there are children born, outsourced from day one into a daycare production line or a neglectful nanny, never lovingly held by their own mothers and left to cry without any help or comfort. The imprinting is permanent. They grow up, brittle, unhappy, and angry people, hating life, wishing it would end.

So I must feel blessed that I was born into a loving home, have loving parents who nurtured and care for me. I have had the chance to savour this thing called life and it was kind to me.

When it is time to close my eyes and say goodbye forever, I will remember that in my life I have loved and I have brought joy to others, I have given life to my son and loved him and taught him well. That I have caused as little pain as I could to others to sustain my own existence, and in the process, inspired others to do the same. And that I have created with my mind and my hands many good things I hope will outlive my memory.

At my funeral, this too, shall be read:

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Here is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than 100 million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, ‘the present century.’ The present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century’s being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest-festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of Earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random will have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation will put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship’s ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship’s robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn’t it what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn’t arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn’t burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we gradually apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discovering it, should not subtract from its wonder.”

~ Richard Dawkins from Unweaving the Rainbow

Every mother needs it. Personal time. I had been craving it for a while and indulged the past week or so post-midnight till about 3-5am doing mindless things like reading novels, surfing for stuff to buy from the The Animal Rescue Store, scouring goss online, and writing emails to friends. The past 2 days I have been printing photos of Jack for his family.

I don’t know about other stay-home moms but I have been feeling very nesty. Aye. The nesting instinct is strong in me and I spent the better half of an hour at Ikea looking for stuff to make our home more homey for our family. My better half loved the art print of a real-life Feralas harbour (damn I miss that game!).

When I bought it, I had given up on putting up my own paintings on our wall, even though DH thought they are great to be hung up. First of all, all but one are incomplete. Second, I think my skill needs improvement and that can only be achieved some years from now when I can carry my child without oil paint on my fingers (I am a messy painter).

As a mother, I have sacrificed a lot – television, movies, personal time, clubbing (much overrated now), free time, and sleep. Yet I feel I have gained a whole new world in return. Cooking, caring, and holding this little creature made from my husband and I is nothing short of amazing. Yet it is the most natural thing in the world. Two family members asked recently how I felt about being a full-time mother. I responded, it’s the hardest job I’ve ever done but also the most rewarding.