Mother's Day stories of courage and love.

When I woke up this morning, I saw my 14-year-old daughter secretly preparing breakfast. She said it’s for her mom because it’s Mother’s Day. 

It was a scrumptious breakfast with bacon, choco-chip pancakes, scramble eggs and cheese, and they were all perilously stacked on top of one another, like a cheesy Leaning Tower of Pisa. 

Incidentally, if you google the leaning tower, this pops up: -

“The famous Leaning Tower is located in Pisa, standing on a grassy field known as "Square of Miracles"”. This is an apt theme for Mother’s Day this morning. 

For me, the leaning tower represents maternal imperfections and it nestles on the grassy field of miracles. These little miracles are seen in the eyes of our children. That’s the enduring picture of motherhood on this special day.

If you read the papers today, the Life section, three single mothers stand out. They are Ms Faridah Ali Chang, Ms Nancy Thio and doula Ginny Phang-Davey.

Reading their stories, you will note they do not put themselves out as supermoms, but as ordinary moms overcoming extraordinary odds. And they are extraordinary because they never gave up. 

Just for the purpose of this post, I would like to bring out the story of Nancy Thio. She is a lawyer. 

Her husband, Thomas, passed away in 2011 of colon cancer. He was only 38. 

Before that, Nancy said that “life was ideal for (us). We were married five years before we had kids. We travelled the world. I loved him very deeply.”

She recalled that Thomas was promoted quickly and posted to many countries by his company. During that time, they were relishing the good life. 

However, when he had cancer, Nancy stopped working for two years to take care of him. 

She said: “My identity was very derived from my husband. He was a very intelligent man who rose from zero to someone people looked up to. He was a very loving and responsible father and husband.”

After Thomas passed on, Nancy was completely lost. She had to take care of their three children. She said: “To be a parent is already tough” and her early season as a widower mum proved to be an “overwhelming, lonely and brutal journey.””

“There were times when I wanted to run away from my children. I felt like an evil mother...I had self-doubt and self pity and I couldn’t go out with friends who were couples. I was labelled as a widow and felt my family was incomplete without a father.”

Nancy said that she spent her time hiding in the gym, “drank to numb her pain and took midnight drives alone.” She added: “I was physically present for the children, but emotionally absent. I couldn’t deal with the fact of raising them on my own without my beloved husband.”

Two incidents thereafter changed her life around. Here is the first incident as reported. 

“...about three months after his death, when the tyre of her car burst on an empty road.(Nancy) remembers sobbing by the kerb for an hour and angrily telling God: "This I also have to do."”

She said that “the car had been her husband's domain, besides finances and household maintenance such as changing the lightbulbs.”

"I felt very tired and helpless. I was thinking about what people told me, that time will heal. But I looked at the tyre and realised that if I sat there and did nothing, the air was not going to go into the tyre. I had to do something. In the same way, I had to take small steps to recover from my grief and help myself and my children. That was the turning point."

This was when Nancy signed up for counselling. She also joined Wicare Support Group for widows and their offspring.

Her second turning point was when she asked for forgiveness from her children. 

"They were like me - I was cold and angry and didn't want to show that I was vulnerable and grieving. We had been very sociable, but now we were withdrawn as a family."

Nancy conveyed to them that "mummy can cry and not build walls.”

She said, “Children are very forgiving. Over time, the family grew closer and stronger.””

Lesson? Just one, and it brings me back to the “square of miracles” where the leaning tower stands. 

Mothers can’t do it alone. If it takes a village, then at the centre of that village are little miracles they experience with their loved ones, in particular, their children. 

For Nancy, her three children turned her tears into bridges not walls. Her kids stood in the gap for her after Thomas passed on, and their forgiveness healed the relationship.

Let me end with one of Nancy’s turning points when her tyre burst. 

You’d recall she said: “... (as) I looked at the tyre and realised that if I sat there and did nothing, the air was not going to go into the tyre. I had to do something. In the same way, I had to take small steps to recover from my grief and help myself and my children.”

Indeed, the journey of life, healing and restoration is sometimes as simple as pulling ourselves up and taking the first step to, well, pump air into the tyre. 

Just as air is not going to go into the tyre on its own, miracles are not going to happen if we ourselves are deflated, empty and broken. 

Nancy said she took “small steps to recover” and every step since that day by the kerb has transformed her life and her relationship with her children.

And I am sure this is what Thomas wanted for her and his children, that is, a family (with all their vulnerability and frailty) standing on the bountiful field of miracles whose sown seed is and has always been overcoming love. 

Blessed Mother’s Day to all. Amen.

What is suffering? Mum hits toddler, ending up with cerebral palsy.

What do I know about suffering? 

I don’t. And what I read in the papers today reported by Cara Wong shows my ignorance, and more relevantly, the pain others go through just to make ends meet or stay sane. 

Cara’s report is entitled “Toddler hit by mum suffers cerebral palsy.”

A mother, only 27, pleaded guilty to three charges of child abuse. She will be sentenced at a later date. 

The victim is her middle child, only 23 months old. Her other two boys are young, one is 4 and the other is only one month. The children’s father do not live with them. 

The mother had anger issues and the incident happened on March 25 last year. If you have the heart for it, here is what happened.

She was bathing her two boys at that time when she noticed that the middle child was “digging into his diaper and playing with his faeces.”

“This angered her as she wanted to end bath time, and she slapped him hard once on the right cheek. But the boy did not stop and the woman slapped him hard once more on the other cheek.”

This was the unintentional fatal slap so great “that the victim’s body turned midway and the victim fell sideways, with his head hitting hard against one of the legs of a nearby metal table.”

“The boy cried and his body started to shake violently as his mother tried to calm him down. She massaged him with some oil, but he became barely responsive and was semi-conscious.”

At this time, the mother panicked and called a friend for help. She was afraid that her kids will be taken from her by the authorities. Her friend urged her to call the ambulance and it came within 15 mins. 

But it was too late. “The boy was found to have cerebral palsy as a result of his severe head injuries, and his developmental age was that of a six-month-old child.”

The boy had undergone surgery and that has left him “unable to be fed orally” and was also “assessed to be likely dependent for all his daily needs from then on.”

The mother’s past records showed that this was not the first time she had physically handled him.

“(She) had previously punched him more than five times in the chest when he did not listen to her instructions. In another incident, she fractured his arm by yanking it forcefully when he refused to go to the toilet for a bath.”

Lesson?...

How do you ever recover from this? What can you do to turn back time and freeze that moment just before you release that forceful blow on your son ? How you wish you could undo all that. How you wish you could say sorry. 

Alas, the hand that injures will be the same hand that cares for life. 

That one irredeemable moment had sadly turned into a lifetime of pain and regrets only the one going through it will experience. The boy didn’t even know what he had done wrong and his mom will have to live with that. 

Truly, who would have thought that two lives so intertwined could change so much from an event as unsuspecting as when one is at home bathing her kids? 

And I understand that justice would have to be done for all cases. But in this case, I lament with this, “For whom is justice to be done?” 

I mean, what punishment could sufficiently serve its sentencing aim for the one who had caused this when the one who had caused this is herself also a victim of the circumstances she had little or no control over. 

She was alone. She was bathing her kids. Her husband, the children’s father, did not live with them. He was of no help. She saw her son playing with his faeces. He didn’t stop. He’s playful. She’s angry. She lost it. The blow came. It came twice. She just wanted him to stop. He’s naughty. The metal table was nearby. It happens to be there. 

That unintentional slap determines the boy’s trajectory. Anger makes no measurement of one’s strength released. It is blind, but a mother’s love is not. A mother’s love can spot her child even in the masses of strangers. A mother’s love will fight to not allow the authorities to take her children away from her. Yet, it’s human love, and at times, it succumbs to human failings.

At this point, in case you are wondering...no, I am not making excuses for our actions. But I earnestly lament over the circumstances some of us are forced to accept, and over other circumstances most of us sadly take for granted. 

Indeed, there are diligently reaped blessings even in the worst of our circumstances, and there are unwittingly heaped curses in the best of them. 

But let’s not detract from the case, and this morning, my lamentation takes me beyond the human concept of justice to its unwieldy application in the lives of people whose cry for understanding and help often falls on deaf ears because most of us are busy with making a living and seldom living it out with a purpose that goes beyond our own material aspirations. 

Alas, even the noblest of intentions in this postmodern affluent world is often nothing more than focusing our effort on serving an altruistic objective that has progressively become so narrowly defined within one’s legalistically shaped institutional framework that the best of intentions is often lost in the bubbling swamp of our dark human desires we rather not make public. 

Again, I have derailed. I have allowed my lamentation to get the best of me. I apologise for that. 

But I make no apologies for what we have become through our babelian efforts to solve our own human-created problems, and one of them is our jurisprudential understanding of what a mother in this case deserves for her unthinking actions in the circumstances she will have to struggle to accept and surmount. It is no less a herculean feat for her. 

And as a father, my heart goes out to the boy who will never know what normal means because of one misguided and intemperate act that has deprived him of a growth and maturity he was born to enjoy and hone as his own.

Life has a way of turning things around - William Wan's journey of life.

William Wan knew that life has a way of turning things around if you do not give up.

He shared the most intimate struggle of his life with us in the papers today, entitled: “Fired? Take it as being re-fired in the kiln of life.”

It all happened 20 years ago when he was 51. He said: “I was in the prime of my chosen vocation in the not-for-profit sector.”

He recalled that he was “unceremoniously terminated” after three years of work locally. He had signed a five-year contract, which was extended to 10, only to be fired in three. 

Up till today, the reason for that decision was “still enshrouded in mystery.”

That’s not all. 

William was also accused of “no fewer than 31 allegations of misdeeds”. But he wrote that they were “immediately withdrawn after they were made known and found to be totally ludicrous.”

He said he could have sued for wrongful termination and defamation, but he withheld his hands. He said he chose not to prolong the pain. 

The thing about William’s article is that he is viscerally honest, open and candid. He hid little of his personal angst from his readers. 

He admitted, “Still, I was and am no saint.” 

“I recall the feeling of shame, anger and bitterness. The thought of doing something violent did cross my mind, I must shamefully confess. That must have been my lowest moment. But thankfully, it remained a thought and lingered only momentarily.”

You must understand that he started his article with a news report “about a young man arrested for allegedly murdering his boss after he was fired a second time from his job last month.” 

And that is why he related his own anguish in the open for all to read. He too harboured “violent thoughts.”

Apart from the sleepless nights and extreme stress and anxiety, William wrote, “I found myself grieving a deep sense of loss - the loss of my community and a personal death - feeling that something important to and in me had just died.”

To him, it was a deep betrayal. And the betrayal was from leaders who were his childhood friends. The thought that they “conspired to destroy (his) reputation was very difficult for (him) to accept.” 

The tale however has an amicable ending.

He admitted that he “was able to accept the reality” and even conceded that he “must have contributed to the situation in the way (he) reacted to their high handedness.” 

He said: “I decided to forgive anyway and that set the stage for some public apology and reconciliation 14 years after the firing. They reached out to me and I responded in kind.”

He added that one of the lessons he had learned was to always keep a positive mindset. 

He said, “in my case, my positive mindset was sustained by my personal faith. I believe that good can come out of any bad situation. I am grateful that the firing turns out to be a re-firing process in the kiln of life, in which a useful vessel emerges from a slab of messy clay.”

“Fire or re-fired? It’s a matter of perspective. I chose and continue to see it as an opportunity to be re-fired and that changed my life.”

Lesson? Mm...

It’s monday, and two days later, it’s Labour Day. It is a day of rest and reflect. And Dr William Wan’s faithful spirit to overcome the valleys of his life cannot be a better start to refresh the jaded soul of the labour we give day in and out for our family and loved ones. 

If you read his powerful testimony, he sums it up with these words, “we are all flawed humans”, “personal pain becomes less excruciating when shared with family and friends,” “we should practise forgiveness for our own well-being, freedom to move comes from the ability to forgive and be forgiven,” and “we must be ready to reinvent ourselves. There is life beyond our comfort zone.”

On reinventing oneself, William returned to becoming a lawyer and has been successful in his own rights, starting the kindness movement and receiving accolades and recognition for being an exceptional leader.

Alas, it just reminds you about that life-throwing-lemon aphorism, right? 

Mind you, William did not just turn it into franchised lemonade stands for sale, he moved on in life and achieved even greater things that touched and moved many lives. 

But what captured my soul in his testimony is that part about us being “a slab of messy clay.” William said that out of the re-firing kiln of life, he emerged a useful vessel handcrafted out of a slab of messy clay. 

I can imagine the master potter at work here, molding and kneading us in every possible angle, compressing and packing it in, at times putting us back into the re-firing kiln, just so that the finished product would not only be life-transforming privately, but others-inspiring, publicly. 

Mm...I always wonder, what is truly the gift of life. I trust it’s not just the time we are born. That may no doubt be a gift, but it is the second gift that transforms us permanently, completely. 

That second gift of life is empowering because it shatters all the presumptions we have and hold about ourselves. It shatters our comfort zone. It shatters our arrogance and self-conceit. It shatters the belief in our own invulnerability. It shatters what we thought could never be shakened. 

As a sidenote, we Christians always go on our knees in anxious prayer when our foundation is shakened only to discover that the one shaking it is none other than the fashioning hands of our master potter. 

Likewise, this second gift of life is enduring and transforming because as William puts it, “I am grateful that the firing turns out to be a re-firing process in the kiln of life, in which a useful vessel emerges from a slab of messy clay.” 

Indeed, what a refining vessel he is. The mishapen, unwieldy clay surrendered to the kiln’s fire, and in the anvil of faith and hope, he emerged stronger, better and most of all, with a heart of humility and charity. 

That messy clay turns out to be the master’s masterpiece. Amen.

A hiao gene? LGBTQuestion.

“Do we have the hiao gene?” (“Hiao” as in Hokkien for vain). 

That’s what law don and activist Thio Li Ann asked. Here it is in full and in its context.

“I take the position that there is a degree of choice. Someone said you might have a genetic predisposition but we all know we don’t act on our impulses.”

“You could have the hiao gene, right? It doesn’t mean you sleep with every man you come across. There is some degree of control, some degree of choice. And yes, the social environment will condition it.”

Mm...after reading that, I wonder, is there a pai kia gene (Hokkien for gangsta)? That is, someone who is prone to becoming violent due to his inability to control his actions. 

Well, that said, it is quite proven that some of us have anger management issues (more than others). And it could very well be in the neuro-hardwiring. 

Our ability is control it is less than others who are born with better prefrontal constitution. 

And if you take a roll call in prison, you will notice that this violent gene is largely gender-biased too.

How about the adulterous gene then? Or, the greedy gene? The love-to-eat-nonstop gene? The holiday-addict gene? The lust-at-first-sight gene? 

Aren’t we a hotwired mishmash of genetic predispositions setting us up for a world of endless behaviourial possibilities upon birth when we interact with the epigenetically triggered social environment?

I guess the debate will go on like the Titanic song because one side will argue that predisposition is not destiny, (like Thio did), and another side will come back with the argument that whether it is destiny or not, it’s really none of your business.

And the follow-up on that side is this, don’t tell us what is right or wrong when you can’t even get your house in order, and you have since the one who had crucified on the Cross, that is, two thousand years ago, to get it right, but thus far, it is still so far from ideal. 

And if you claim to be work-in-progress, it’s time you change your “spiritual subcontractor” because the high penalty you have to pay for delayed righteousness personified as claimed is long, long overdue. 

Needless to say, the push-and-pull tug of war has always been tense and taut with religion being the main agent provocateur (as seen by some). And mind you, not any religion, but only lslam and Christianity. 

And the religious barometer here is section 377A. PM Lee noted that “both sides hold strong views, and in particular, many who oppose its repeal “do so on very deeply held religious convictions.””

He added: “I should therefore say that as a matter of reality, the more gay activists push this agenda, the stronger will be the push-back from conservative forces in our society.”

Alas, you can rest assured that when (or if) section 377A is repealed, both sides are going to dig their heels even deeper into their respective dogmatic trenches to wage a war of ideals that will see no end in sight.

The Christians are already digging their foxhole in preparation for a sturdy defence (or earthly offence) with these words from pastor Derek Hong. “It’s not a crusade against the people but there’s a line that God has drawn for us, and we don’t want our nation crossing that line.”

Actually, if you think about it, our nation has already crossed many lines. Some lines get away with it because of commonsensical economic justification.

Take the casinos for example. When you can’t beat them because such commercial activities bring in the tax revenue, employment for the masses, and attraction and world acclaim, you coyly redraw the line back a little to preserve your spiritual purity and defence. 

Other lines are blurred in the sand like criminalising adultery (where you are liable to be stoned to death in another era) because of cultural changes, the enlightenment movement, and our government’s secular balancing of various conflicting interests in the name of keeping the peace for one and all. 

And so, we are left with the gay line to defend - as Derek said, “we don’t want our nation crossing that line.” 

(And I know the good pastor meant it metaphorically, but we tend to overlook unintended consequences, and one of that is how different believers draw their own lines because spiritual authority is remarkably individualistic)

Here, I can imagine the last scene of Endgame where the Avengers on one side and Thanos’ stooges on the other side are clashing into each other in a epic fight to save and redeem humanity for the last time. 

But the difference is that for endgame, everybody throws their weight on one side. For the gay line, the society is clearly fractured and divided. 

And as a Christian, I was personally caught in the crosshair of the target (by my own camp!) when I decided to traipse across the line in an earnest attempt to understand the other side. 

You see, due to my so-called liberal writings about section 377A seven months ago, some believers are of the view that I have crossed over and should be shunned, avoided. 

Well, I can’t say that I am not a little pleasantly surprised about it, because I thought my writings were supposed to open minds, not close them. 

So, that is where we as a nation stands today. We are not just a fine country, but on some religious/social issues, we are also a line country. 

And no, I am not talking about line dancing where we all get together to have fun. But it is about a line that once you cross it, you run the risk of being considered as no longer one of us. Cheerz.