Handicraft

I am an avid handicraft person since my teenager days. Anything fanciful catches my attention and I had always been curious on how an object of beauty is created. Oops...but I'm not good with any though... .

My mother is the inspiration to my interest and hobby. She sews beautifully and she's a perfectionist. She makes just anything out of nothing. Just a glance and she could make that little beauty out of memory using scraps she can find around her. I wish I have her talent. But that is what the previous generation ladies were able to do - being displaced from their homeland China and having to fight for survival in a foreign land, it's really a survival of the fittest.

Talking about my mother, she's a charming lady- a beauty in our Chinese way. She's so versatile and so gentle to the point of being intimidated by my father. She put up with a lot of hardship. Being hardworking and loving, she is really the one who had brought up all of us. I've never heard her complain. To vote her as the mother of mothers seems so insufficient to credit her. Perhaps there are other mothers like her but to me, she is just not like all mothers. She's special, really special... . I can't imagine how she manages to survive in our state of poverty then, seven tiny mouths to feed and we were surviving on the little that my father brought home as a bus driver then.

My father was a tyrant in the eyes of us kids but deep down, he was a loving and caring father. He was more Chinese than the mainland Chinese. China has evolved so much and is so modernised but my father was still living in his past then. It was sad when he left us. He never progressed with time. He would have lived a better life if only he could see things differently, closed an eye to what he didn't like to see and just let go of his hold on his old believes. He is a sad story of a man displaced, one who clung on to old believes and still insisted on a big family theory. But then, I really don't blame him as he had gone through a lot when he first stepped foot in Malaysia just when he was barely twenty. The bitterness and hardship he went through must have left an imprint so deep and painful that the scar could never be erased.

I couldn't do much for my father but what about my mother? I've not done anything much for her all these years either. It's a real shame, a shame which I personally don't know how to handle. A shame which pricks my heart every time I think about her.

Can someone out there tell me what I should do?

I'm married with my own commitments. Sometimes I wonder if I'm a coward or simply stupid... Chinese custom says the parents stay with their sons. Girls are like water in a basin that's splashed out when they got married. And, I can't take her into my home unless my husband gives his consent. Sometimes, I wish I haven't got married then...Perhaps life would have been simpler and less complicated.