STI: Mum's the word

Aug 28, 2004

Mum's the word
by Sharon Loh

MY CHILDREN are still of the age when Mummy worship is quite the thing.

To them, I am the bee's knees.

I am powerful, wise and pretty.

I am, quite simply, the best Mummy in the world.

Enjoy it while it lasts, a friend said, before they grow up and the scales fall from their eyes.

While organising a retro party for her daughter's 12th birthday, she mused out loud: 'I wonder what I will wear.'

Her daughter Jessica replied: 'What does it matter what you wear?'

My girls still gasp when I emerge dressed and made up, and say: 'Oh Mummy, you look beeaauutiful!'

Gosh, but it's nice to be seen through rose-tinted glasses again.

All parents - especially mothers - get this grace period of a few short years during which they bask in the largely undiscerning affection of their offspring.

This is before the children grow up and realise that Mummy and Daddy are human after all.

Until that happens, your relationship with your child is a heady infatuation which excludes everyone else.

It's like being in love again.

So I am the recipient of extravagant expressions of affection, as well as real trophies.

These include cards, drawings and knick knacks made specially almost every day for me or their Daddy.

The house is littered with artwork which trumpets I Love You Mummy, or I Heart Mummy, written, you can tell, with the greatest care for all its childishness.

They protest when I leave for work, and whoop with joy when I am home on weekends.

At meals, they fight to have me sit in between them.

Actually, that's become a rather tiresome ritual.

And as with any infatuation, I am idealised, my virtues magnified, the flaws largely missed.

Isabel, especially, is Mummy-crazy.

Our farewells when I leave for work can take 10 minutes.

It's like Bergman and Bogart clinging to each other on the tarmac.

At birthday parties, she would rather play with me than other children.

Given half a chance, she's in my lap.

As she is tucked into bed, she will grab my neck and whisper, 'I love you more than anything in the world (pause) and also Daddy, and Gong Gong and Ma Ma and Jan Jan and Nana and Alexis.'

Then she says, 'Hold my hand', and will not go to sleep until I do.

Her hunger to be loved back is intense.

She will ask, 'I'll always be your baby, no matter how old I get, right?'

The last time I was this crazy about somebody, I married him.

And I certainly didn't expect such sweet nothings from another quarter afterwards.

One day, the dopamine rush they get from a true romance will surpass the feelings they have now.

But it's not surprising that Mummy is their first love.

After all, she is life itself.

For a good few years, she is everything in the world, the miracle-worker who makes sure your tummy is filled when you are hungry, who soothes every hurt and illness, who knows what to do in any situation.

As a child, I never told my Mummy that I loved her, because such verbal demonstration was unnecessary and alien, but I panicked when it dawned on me that she could die and leave me.

For years, as with many children, I lived morbidly with it as my greatest fear.

She was as necessary as air and water.

If she was not at home, the house seemed unbearably silent and empty.

When she was there, it felt different, alive, full of the comfort of the noises she would make as she worked in the kitchen. I would feel happy and secure.

It's no coincidence that Isabel has become more starved for affection ever since I went back to work.

She is anxious that the ground has been cut from under her.

It won't be long before my children's intense adoration is transferred elsewhere, as it should be, and those love notes for me turn into Valentines for new sweethearts.

But the sweet here and now should be savoured, though that is sometimes easier said than done, when you have a child clinging to you that you want to prise off with a crowbar.

Still, as you tell her to run off and play with friends her age, part of you instantly regrets it, because you know that one day all she will want to do is go off and play with friends her age.

As my mum-in-law says, with children, it's either feast or famine.

Already, Alexis is growing more distant.

She is developing a life that she doesn't necessarily want to share with me.

As with all honeymoons, this too must end.

One day, the kids will start saying, 'I love my Mum, but...'

They will start to realise that you do make mistakes, that you can disappoint them, and break your promises.

And as they make a break with you to find themselves, which happens with everyone eventually, the wonder years could become a wilderness of forgetting how much you used to mean to each other.

But till then, these years are a special dispensation - probably because parenting would be a mighty thankless task otherwise - when you are the most important person in the world, bar none, to someone.

That's something indeed.