Love Her, Love Ris @ blog.loveris.sg

Jermaine has always has emotion-problems. She gets very defensive easily and her temper is big for a kid like her. I have been trying all ways, trying so hard to tone her down, but its really not easy. I’ve started to wonder if it was the genes, you know, like how a child would takes on certain character of her parents. I have seriously began to doubt that it wasn’t because of the environment she grew up in… It was more than that.

I am very sad. She is just a child afterall, how can she comprehend all these? She has been doing so well, at least I know, I could see deep beyond her mask that she is trying her best to shove her problems away. Believe me, she is really so much happier when they never call, when she do not have to go to their place. I am her mother, and everyone knows a mother knows best. They wasn’t around to see her face changed whenever she had to take a call from them, and how long she took to adjust her emotions after she hang up the phone. They wasn’t there when she couldn’t sleep at night with her mind preoccupied with thoughts. Jermaine always sleeps well, but sometimes tears would flow down her cheeks before she fell asleep. I knew, cuz I was there to check on her and caressed her face, whisper a sweet goodnight and sometimes felt her wet pillow. It wasn’t easy on her. She was just a kid afterall. It is just so unfair that she has to learn how to deal with complicated emotional issues when it isn’t time for her yet.

So when her teacher called me this morning to tell me how defensive Jermaine got when a random remark was made on her results, I totally understand where Jermaine was getting from. So I explained to her new teacher at RGPS how complicated life has been for Jermaine and I was very touched when the teacher offer to put her on School Counselling.

This is really a piece of good news. Let’s have hope in her.

It has been a long time since I feel this dejected. The reason of my dejection is always because of Jermaine. I had a fight with her natural father a few days ago about her living arrangements in the upcoming June Holidays. He asked for 2 weeks and I cannot agree. He couldn’t understand why I do not allow Jermaine to stay with him longer during visitation since it’s the school holidays… and I see no point in explaining. We have fought so many times in the past, over and over again over the custody, the care and control, the living arrangements, every single thing about Jermaine and my hard work, my determination to have her over, finally paid off… so why should i? Why should I let Jermaine stay with him for even an extra day during visitation?

He did not understand. He accused me of turning the table… I dont care. Why should I be afraid of him? I have all the papers in order stating very clearly how many days of visitation he get? He had made it very clear when he decided to relinquish his care and control. He said only wanted 2 weekends a month and he will not pay any child support. I grant him whatever he asked for then without questions, in return for Jermaine to stay with me. I did not bargain at all. I love Jermaine enough for whatever crap I have to endure for so many years. Can he do that? No.

And his mother have the cheek to call me on my handphone to scold me, hurling all kind of ungrateful remarks at me and hang up the phone the moment she had vented enough anger at me. This is outright harassment! I was shocked myself for letting her do that. Why didnt I just hang up the phone? Have I grown accustomed to all her harassment all these years? Calling my office, calling my handphone, calling my mother… When I told him I demand an apology from his mother, he thinks I am just joking… When i told him i am serious, he got agitated just like his mother. I swear I wont let her off if she do it another time, who are they to me? What right does they have to treat me this way? B**tards!

I am not afraid of them anymore.

They want to fight? Bring it on!

My poor Jermaine, what will happen to you if I am gone one day? I dare not think.

Jermaine was well on her way to finish her SA1 Exams when she caught the fever bug. She had been sick since sunday and I am very worried for her. She was so feverish that she had to miss school today and her Maths Paper. I did not sleep well at all through out the night, keep waking up checking on her, and keep thinking if I should let her go to school today. Then it suddenly hit me with the current H1N1 Flu pandemic, she would not be able to get pass the school gate with her temperature this high.

I will be making arrangement with her form teacher to seek alternate timing for her maths paper. I do have a funny thought that came to my mind a few times now, am I giving her too much stress causing her to came down with fever. I know she hates maths and she is quite terrible on this subject, and I have try gave her quite a lot of practices to do to prepare for this paper. But of course, “Stress” has not been scientifically explore yet very conveniently used.

I do hope it’s the weather.

Please get well soon.

I’ve cut Jermaine a fringe and also trimmed Charlize’s fringes over the weekend. I felt a great sense of achievement being able to cut their hair well. Charlize sat very very still on the toliet bowl (with lid closed), and she seemed to know that any slight or sudden movement will caused unrepairable damage to her baby hair. Its fun watching the kids grew. Charlize is no longer a baby… she is a full toddler, always curious, always eager to learn and play. Its exhausting at times to try to keep up to Charlize’s pace.

Jermaine had grew into a fine young lady sooner than i thought. On closer look, one cannot deny her beautiful facial features and her beautiful crown of black hair. Its funny to look at her that way, and a sudden thought came in and i almost wanted to stop her from growing up further. Naive as i can be, i think its understandable for a mother to feel this way about her child. I have walked too fast and forgotten to stop and rest, and to appreciate my two beautiful kids…

This week, Jermaine will be having her SA1 (Mid-Year Examinations) and it is definitely a big deal for me. I am trying to prepare Jermaine as much as i can. I can get so stressed and worked up that i would bring out the cane. I do feel guilty seeing myself emerged into the typical competitive parents in Singapore… I have always impressed upon Jermaine that i take education seriously, unless she is by nature not the study-material, i will try my very best to path the way of success for her.

The latest episode of Desperate Housewives (current season), Edie Brit was asked if she would regret “giving” her son away, she replied “I love him enough for him to hate me”… What bitter words that was… with the depth only mothers would understand. Sometimes, we all been there, we did something and we got unsure for a while, we wonder the how would the kids feel when they got there eventually. Sometimes we made bitter decisions, but we all know we love them enough for them to blame us.

It is all for their good

On another note, Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers in the world!

I have been a mother for 9 years… and thats good enough to boast about.

“No time to do last question, gave examiner quality answers for all the rest i had attempted. Now i feel relief. MCQs easy. Case Study easy but no time to complete. Sigh”

This is what i have wrote in my sms to Stev. Almost immediately when all the candidates step out of the exam hall, i could hear cursing and swearing. I know… no amount of cursing and swearing can help. Time stop for no one. So i had my first try on CPA examinations… It is actually not as difficult as what most people perceived… or it is just me.

Anyway, Stev’s reply is a simple “Sometimes MCQ too easy is too good to be true.”

Passing the paper should be no problem for me (i think…) but to score well, is quite out of my reach for now.

I deserve a good rest tonight.

Tomorrow will be my RPP Paper. My only hope is that i will have enough time to complete the Paper. If there is enough time, i should be fine…

I forgot how it was like to prepare for examinations.
After this paper, i will be taking Corporate Governance and Accountability (CGA)… I hope everything can go according to plan.

May the force be with me…

My RPP Paper is just 1 week away and i have stop revision altogether… its weird, i am not sure why but i just dont feel like doing any revision now. I dont even feel like opening up the files or think about it. I have not really prepare for the paper yet but i am not panicky or worried. I am not sure why… Maybe the “mood” have not really set in or i am just numb…

I hope i am not being over comfortable with myself, in a way, i am kind of happy to have prepare myself for just 60% of the results. I think i am hopeless. Have been used to working within very tight deadlines over the past few years, work has made me into a problem solving machine. I have set my final deadline to be tomorrow. I have to start some serious revision from tomorrow. No more procrastination after today.

Truth is… i am more worried about Jermaine’s SA1 than my RPP Paper. Although i know i should concentrate on my own stuff first as i have ample time to coach Jermaine after the paper, i cant seem to push myself any further… i am just very worried that she will not do well. Afterall, it is a very big switch from a neighbourhood school to RGPS and the standard from her new school is very high. RGPS do not have CA1 unlike Jermaine’s previous schools so i cannot really benchmark Jermaine’s progress with the rest of her class. I really hope she wont be far too behind from her peers.

I will start with Maths, and then i will go through her Science. Chinese is also quite a problem for Jermaine now… English i can skip if i really have no time. I need to plan my leaves also, to study with her before her papers… Go ahead and judge me, people… but i really take it quite hard when it comes to my children’s education.

I hope i can apply it to my own studies as well.

Stev woke me up last night to talk to me about his dilemma of whether to take up GARP FRM or PRMIA PRM (I hope i had got the spelling right…) on top of his Master in Applied Finance. He said it will do him good in his career in Risk Management. So we talked for a while… and i am glad we have this conversation. Being married to him has changed me in a lot of way, he made me into a more patient person and he has also… somehow… curb my rashness in a lot of ways. Everyone who had known me for a long time were puzzled when they found Stev so far away from what they would have thought would be my ideal husband. I laugh a the irony a lot of times myself and my reply to them was that”Life always has its way of planning things out for us…”

There, comes my nagging husband asking me to study and stop wasting time. Hmmm…. ok, procrastination over.

Is marriage such a difficult lesson to learn? I bet. Its not something easy to write about… It takes a lot of hard and soft skills to make a marriage work, and I am definitely in no position to give any advises on how to make marriages last. Though i hope life experiences can help in a way, whenever we stop and check, it is worthwhile to remind ourselves not to take things for granted.

I have always been a confident person, be it work or play, i am always “ok” and not needing anyone to worry about me. I am someone with plans, i plan hard and long and i know exactly what i want in life… but plans dont usually go the way we want them to be. All plans in the path of life involves people around you.. its tricky because you cant plan their reaction or perception should they crosses your path.

Marriage is hard. Men are hard to please… I heard so much stories on the things some husbands do behind their wives and how capable they are, to leave their wives clueless about their vices. It used to be something very distant from my life, like a touch-and-go topic to talk about in between chit-chats… hence its really kind of difficult to reconcile when such a thing happened to someone close to me. It made me realised a lot of things and it definitely changes my perceptions on a lot of things… i ask myself repeatedly, “Men, how can you be so heartless?”

In Management studies, we go through case studies over case studies… we try to learn from people’s mistakes, we try to provide solutions to them. But in real life, how useful can you apply what you have learnt? Even if you piece everything together, you can never return a broken heart to perfection. So when a dear friend is hurt, i can only be a strong for her. I have to hide my real emotions and feelings, because i know she’s bleeding in her heart. No sweet words can make her feel better, only time can help her through this painful journey.

So i ask myself, why do we get married to someone whom we cannot guarantee will love and protect us forever? Why do we say the vows if we cant keep it? I seriously have no clue. Put it simply, every decision in life is a gamble. And we make our decisions depending on our risk appetite and the opportunity that we are willing to part. People got married for a lot of reasons, i got married because i wanted to start a family…. or even more correctly, because i wanted to complete my life. I know marriage is not a warranty, it does not give me a lifetime of happiness. But it is my float, something i cling on dearly… its makes a lot of things worthwhile.

Life is too complicated, we often forgot to appreciate it and the people who made it our life.

I hope with my previous encounters in life, i will remember to be more appreciative of what i have now with Stev and my beautiful girls. I do not know know how long this happiness will last… perhaps only when it finally end, i will know if i had tried my best…

Happiness does not fall from the sky, its built over hardwork and time… sprinkled with love, tolerance and wit..

In my years growing up, my mother was the sole person taking care of the family, from cooking to housechores to taking care in nurturing us, i have never seen anyone as dedicated as her. We have never had a maid or any other helpers in the family and it was kind of difficult at first, to convince my in-laws of the idea of getting a maid to help out with the chores…

There is really too much on my plate… its both taxing and vexing to be on tip-top form at all times, be it at work or at home. I really cant handle all the hats that i am suppose to wear. Finally, we were going to get a domestic helper, its a very new concept so all the family members, especially my mother-in-law, came together to see through the details. From sourcing a good maid agency to viewing all the maids’ profile, phone-interviewing to finally meeting Kris, my first maid.

She was, in my opinion, not too bad at housework, she is smart and proactive and she is very friendly… at least that was my first impression of her… A few months passed and we realised that she is not smart, but too smart, to the extent that i can put the words “Smart-Alec” down to describe her… she is not just friendly but overly friendly to the extent that every single maids in my block knew her and we observed that the Bangladeshi cleaner working for my block became a little too friendly to her.

Despite catching her lying in my face a few times and i gave her chances on the account that she had done the basic chores well, she go on to become more and more daring, i can go on to write all that i can remember but i am not going to pour out my frustration further. The last straw came when we caught her leaving the house in the middle of the night when everyone is sound asleep for more than 2 hours. Till now, we still do not know what went on during that 2 unaccountable hours, but my whole family speculated that she went out to have an illicit affair probably with that Bangladeshi cleaner. We sent her back immediately…

I do feel some form of betrayal, i always thought if you treat someone well, that someone would reciprocate your kindness and i really do think that i have done my best as her employer. It took me a while to close that door…

Yesterday, i went to pick up my new maid. We waited almost 1 month for her… we picked one that is older in age, married with kids and apparently seems to be financially tight, we hope these implied her sincerity in coming to Singapore to work as a domestic helper. Afterall, it is not easy to get a Filipino who is willing to work without day-offs.

After 2 days of observation, Gina (my new maid) seems fine but slightly slower in learning certain things. I can understand and i attribute that to her age. Most importantly of all, i feel a deep sense of relief to know that Jermaine likes her and willing to try to get along well with her. I had so much problem with Kris and Jermaine who seems to be always picking each other for faults… Kris took advantage of the fact that Jermaine is not the natural daughter of Stev and tried to her very best to make Jermaine “look bad” in front of Stev. She would cry in front of us and told us that Jermaine had scolded her very harshly during the day and that she “cannot take it”, causing me to discipline Jermaine, without really getting to the bottom of the matter. Its really adding on to what i have to handle at that moment of time when Jermaine is giving me so much disciplinary problems…

I am glad all these is over now… and being the usual optimistic person i am, i do hope Gina can really be of help to my family.

I remember few years ago when i did my part-time degree, i liked to write about how stressed i was, how tight the deadlines was for my assignments and how many weeks or days left to the final paper… Although i am trying to stay afloat now in the mist of preparing for my RPP Paper, i no longer find that vibe i used to have to keep regular updates of my progress… I had done the reading and making small notes of most of the study materials but i have not started any revisions yet. Hmm… (ok, have to do a quick count..) i am left with 18 days before my RPP Paper. Desperate.

Guess from now on, its more coffee for burning midnight oil. I hope Charlize can be more cooperative and sleeps punctually, so i can keep to my revision plan. I also hope she can stop waking up 2 to 3 times everynight for her “nehnehs…” (Yea… sad to say she’s still on night feeds and she’s turning 2 in 3 months time…) I have long been accustomed to her night feeds or tantrums (sometimes she would just wake up and demand that i sing for her or rock her to sleep… ah little tyrant!) that i actually think i would feel no pain at all for another baby’s demand… there’s practically no difference to making 1 bottle of milk or 2 bottles of milk each time. So the thought of  3rd child came up again this afternoon whilst drawing and scribbling with Charlize on her sketchbook. Charlize loves to draw and she is very good with her left hand and hates using her right. I think its evident that Charlize will most likely be a left-hander. Stev’s says thats not good and hope we can “change” Lize’s habit and somehow “make” her into a right-hander, which i wonder… “is that even possible?”  I have no problem with Jermaine, who used her right hand the first time to pick up a pencil. To me, left or right is not really a problem.

Sigh, Charlize waked up again. I try to write again soon… and hopefully she can go back to sleep in no time so i can pick up where i left with my RPP revision again…