growing up

i thought i would update more in this space, but IG has made me incredibly lazy in documenting my life here. it has been a whirlwind being in D.C. these past 2 years; a period of new experiences and realignment of life priorities.. i've finally had the space to breathe, catch up on sleep, spend (a lot of) time with han yang, being at one with nature, dip my feet into new hobbies and read more, and it was been a refreshing season.

though, i wouldn't say i've been the most focused. there are definitely things that i wish could come quicker. success is one of them. i have plans to do more with pottery and when you are building a brand, the toughest part to get over is the building stage where you don't see much fruits of the labor. many things i wish i could do simultaneously and quicker too. i know it's one of those things that i gotta be consistent with. i get distracted with a lot of other engagements; discipline is the theme of the year- in making, posting, creating, building. that's my main goal of the year, together with another goal of being more financially-savvy.

..and one other thing that i've prioritised this year (and perhaps in years to come) is a baby lol WHAT.

my burgeoning bump from 2nd to the beginning of 3rd trimester, already causing neck/ backaches & sleepless nights.

actually, i still can't believe that i'm gonna be a mum. 

for the longest time, i didn't want to give up my freedom. my growing up years weren't the happiest with a lot of home drama/ instability while i was desperately learning who i was. in the past decade, i've gotten to a stage where i know my strengths and values, and life just gets better with that self-knowledge and acceptance. 

i love the life han yang and i built together. i was happy as a single, and even happier when we got married. it's fun to do things together with a companion, and i could imagine a very fulfilled life with just the 2 of us. i enjoy taking trips whenever we want to, having friends over on friday nights, chatting about our hopes and dreams and fears.. and planning dreams while only taking into consideration 1 other person.

2 years ago, i considered the possibility of not having kids. i believe that no one should ever take for granted that having kids are a natural progression of marriage. just like how we are conscious and goal-oriented going into big decisions in life, like our careers, marriage.. it was important to understand why i wanted/ did not want to expand our family. (i speak of it as a personal decision, because han yang, being the more adjusted one of the both of us, has always wanted kids. it wasn't the same for me.)

the reasons why i did not want kids were mostly functional benefits, with emotional benefits of having more freedom to live my own life. and witnessing unsavoury bits of parenting - having to discipline them when you are tired, doing everything you could as a parent but still producing a shitty brat, having to compromise on my dreams and goals in favour of stability/ providing for them, having to deal with society's judgements on mothers, possibly having to deal with widening gender disparity at the workplace as a working mother.. all in all - i didn't like not having as much control over the quality of our lives once we became parents. 

one reason why i might want kids:

though growing up wasn't easy, i enjoy being with my family. our parents love us unconditionally even though they might not sometimes know how best to handle us. i love having siblings that understand the nuanced and complex relationships within our family. a part of me wants to be part of something bigger than just the 2 of us.

but i felt that reason was a little iffy and wasn't enough to warrant having kids. to add to the reasons why i didn't want kids, i had a fear that i would not be a good parent. compared to 10 years ago, i'm definitely in a better place to be a parent, but i guess the last thing that i want to be is that parent projecting my own expectations/ insecurities on my kids. i could not find a good enough motive to bring up a child; reasons like "continue on family name", "child can look after me when i'm old", "child is a good investment" (having kids are the worst investment what are you talking about lol), "having kids will make me/ my marriage more fulfilling", "having kids will let us have something to work on for our marriage" were all either extremely outdated, did not make sense, or were preludes to heartbreaks/ mismatched expectations/ disappointments.

one fine day, a thought suddenly crossed my mind - 

so why did God create humans? since we are his children, looking at his motives might clue me in on why i should be a parent.

"God saw all that He had made, and it was very good." - Genesis 1:31

and on the 6th day, he created humans.

there it was - the simple answer to one of the most multi-faceted (and important) questions of my life. i don't know why, but suddenly, everything fell into place. that fear of being a bad parent just melted away, knowing that this was the only reason that made sense for me to have kids - that i would like to share our world with a little one/ little ones, because i have seen it for its possibilities.

actually this verse felt very close to me. when i was going through all those years of being aimless and depressed before i found God, the battles were not only just internal emotional, self-esteem/ worth ones that i fought, but it was also reading about the ugliness of people and of the world that brought me down. but i never descended to a point where i felt it was not worth living. there was always a part of me that saw that glimmer of hope - the flip side of beauty & love in this world. and after i knew God, was when that beauty & love was revealed in a greater measure to me, and it has healed and made me whole.

so yes, my boy, we will show you the world in all of its being. it's a world that has both the good and bad, with good that far outweighs the bad, just because we choose to look at it this way. and we will not shield you from it, but promise to be there for you always, and to make sense of it together.

--

saying bye to my old friend, sleep.

Freewill?

(continuing with 2011 exchange writing..)

Grace always knew there was something about that mirror in her room. It was one of those old heavy full length mirror with intricate gold carvings by the side. She was convinced it was magical.  Sometimes when she looked into it, into her own reflection, she felt like the eyes in her reflection were looking right through her. One time she even thought it winked at her. Somehow she wasn’t creeped out by it. She felt this strange magnetic attraction, as if she was drawn to it. It felt. Magical. 

So there was this one day, she was up and about, ready to go for an important event event. Dressed to the nines, she was doing up her hair. She realized that she couldn’t actually see how her hair was like from the back, so she decided she needed another mirror to help her with that. She held her mom’s mirror to the back of her head to examine how her hair was like. Whoa, great job, Grace, she thought to herself. Looking straight ahead now, she realized that she could see her reflection, and then reflection of her reflection of her reflection, and her reflection of her reflection of her reflection of her reflection. And there, in the 13^th frame, she saw her own reflection wave to her.

She froze, and rubbed her eyes. NO. WAY.

Before she could even respond, her 13^th reflection reached out, and just like in the movies, like how the mirror surface turned jello like, that was EXACTLY what happened. It pulled her in.

Grace yelled. She yelled so much, but the next thing she knew, she was on her bed, and her mom was shouting at her to ‘QUIT it and to try to be an example of her name.’

“Sorry ma! I just had the strangest, weirdest dream.”

Well, just quit it will you, or I’ll redraw your privileges to control Grace on Sunday alright?”

“Huhh? Waddyou talkin’about mom?” Grace was dumbfounded. What was mom talking about ‘grace’? she was Grace!? “Don’t act like you don’t know how the rules are, Grace. You little rascal. Control her, or she gets to be free, you make the choice alright?” Grace stared at mom. Some thing was strange about her. Mom was right handed. This woman was holding her hair brush in her left hand. Mom had a mole on her left cheek. This lady had hers on her right.

Oh goodness. Grace screamed again. This time, she suddenly noticed that everything around her was a reflection of her house. She burst out into her garden. Her favorite rose plants were on her left. Her car was a right hand drive instead of left. And what ‘Mom’ had said, what did she mean?

She had to find out. Quickly, Grace swapped her right swept fringe to her left side. Luckily for her, she was ambidextrous. On Sunday, she followed “Mom” to the garage, where she got to peek into a screen which she planned Mom’s activities for the next 7 days. Likewise, before her, Grace sieved through an entire archive of what she had done in her Real World before she came to this parallel universe. From the boyfriends that she had, the silly things that she ever did, the music she ever liked. These were all planned by “Grace”.

Freewill.. What in the world was that? Grace gapped at the screen in front of her.

x

hard disk time capsule

unearthed a couple of writings from my 2011 exchange days. they were mildly entertaining so i'm sharing them here!

---

Mr Tramp, that was what they called him.  His presence was always felt whenever we saw him around the neighborhood, and by that I didn’t mean it in a good way. He had this swagger. Stumpy, almost troll-like. He had a thick, bushy shrub which overwhelmed his entire face, and only his eyes and nose peeked out from his Amazonian forest. I never really knew how he looked like, but I imagined his face was covered with warts and pimples, just like how they speckled his (also very bushy, but to a lesser degree) arms and legs.

His head of hair was greasy, a poor attempt at taming his frizzy mane with bottles of petroleum. He was the kind who sat on buses and left greasy hair prints on the windowpanes. The kind whom people kept a radius of 5 metres from. Have you ever read The Twits by Roald Dahl? I imagined Mr Tramp took his breakfast just like the Twits- by scouring his Amazonian forest for scraps of food from 3 weeks back. He would smack his lips and grunt heartily feeding on decomposing blueberry pancakes. Ew.

No one wanted to be near Mr Tramp. There was one occasion I happened to when I was a little girl on my way to school. I had swung around the corner and bashed right into his belly and boy, did his breath stink of rotting rats and manholes on a New York summer day. “Ohhh girl, don’t go bouncin’ around, be..” I had scooted off in the opposite direction before he completed his sentence, mom’s warning about not speaking to weird strangers ringing at the back of my head.

Like his name suggested, Mr Tramp didn’t have a home. He was always seen wandering around the neighborhood, draped in his brown, holey patched up coat, sleeping in parks and sieving for scraps in the trash. Mom said that Mr Tramp used to be wealthy, and then he got into the wrong dealings at work, lost his job and house and become slightly bonkers. Well, I didn’t know how far that was true, but he was always mumbling to himself.

About 6 months back, I was stuck outside my house waiting for someone to come home as I had forgotten my keys. I saw Mr Tramp 2 blocks away, buying a bagel from a makeshift cart, only to tear it into half and offering it to a shoeless boy.

And then 4 months back, I was at the café alfresco waiting for my date to turn up, when I saw him across the street, offering a quarter to someone fumbling in her purse to make a call on the public phone.

2 months back, I was on my way home late at night on a winter night, when I heard feet shuffling, and then huffing and puffing behind me. I pulled my coat closer and walked faster, afraid to turn around. The sounds grew heavier and it wasn’t long before I broke into a run. That was when I heard “Hey Missy, your purse!” I stopped in my tracks and turned around. Mr Tramp! He drew out his grubby hand and dropped the purse into my hands. Still in shock, I looked up at him. Oh yes, there it was, the 2 eyes hiding in the familiar Amazon forest. They winked.

And today, Sunday morning, I am out on the park bench in the neighborhood having my coffee and sandwich and reading the papers. The headlines read “Our 10 Million Lottery Jackpot Winner”! Ooh, lucky chap, I thought as I checked out the photograph of the Brad Pitt look-a-like.

Just then, someone swaggers by and does a double take like he recognizes me. I look up from my papers, and.. .It’s.. Him?

“Hey Missy, remember me?” He winks, this time his beautiful face in full glory.

the chicken rice war

rooftop bed in jul 2009. that cool post summer night and waking up whenever first rays of sunlight pierced through the clouds. what would i give to be in sync with the heartbeat and caught in the rhythms of the earth.

the potter's hand

those moments of wishful dreams, gone down the pipe when awashed with the waves of routine and practicality of life.

and of those times i walked away out of convenience while the silent chisel chipped away at the heart, bit by bit.

could it be that you were there watching, listening, all along?

---

i'm not enough unless you come
will you meet me here again
'cause all i want is all you are
will you meet me here again

---

thoughts

i don't talk about this often.

but after an afternoon of repaying my sleep debt, my mind is now clearer.

been dismissive of my bad work-life balance, frequently. but this isn't normal at all.

at some points during these 2 months, i just zoned in and out of conscious existence. the prolonged late nights had worn me out. i told myself  'never again' when ever i had to burn the midnight oil to get a report done.

overstepping boundaries:
3 days before my wedding, i was rushing a report till the wee hours of the morning, cutting into my leave.
the day that my niece was born, i took leave in the afternoon, but because of some field related things brought up by client (there was an ultimatum threat), and no one else was around to handle it, i worked through that afternoon.

and it has happened again and again.

6 reports, all from different projects, one after the other, trout slap me. and no, can i say no? what's the alternative? pass it on to someone else who is equally stretched?

i'm glad my time is up.

saving that spark of passion that i have of my job scope before it gets extinguished by the inhumane hours that i put in.

it is a weekday and i'm at home doing what i love <3

What if your blessings come through rain drops
What if Your healing comes through tears
What if a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes to know You're near
What if trials of this life are Your mercies in disguise

sixty days of psalms

"All based on the covenant relationship with God. 

Without the covenant, they would be meaningless.

Particularly in the laments, the pleas are on the basis of the covenant.

The most important word to understand in this context is: chesed

hard to translate: (KJV “lovingkindness” or “mercy” are poor translations)
faithful-love,
loyal-love
love that will never let you down and never give up on you but will hang on to the end

It is possibly the most beautiful word in any human language

It is a fundamental theme of the Psalms and the main thing God is praised for"