Aaron turned 2 and we celebrated his birthday under lockdown- his second time, unable to have a proper celebration, just because circumstances don't allow for it. But he, being that innocent, happy-go-lucky guy, would never know what he would have missed and he would not be any less happy for it.
Happy to just pick some rocks in his hands and fling them around, happy to pluck a small flower budding from a weed on the side walk, hand them to mummy, proudly articulating, "fowwer", grinning from ear to ear at his (simple) achievement.
Motherhood is no easy task, as we celebrate the smiles and milestones, also comes the daily grind and pressure of having to "hold up the sky" for our kids. And being a working mother, compounds the pressure on oneself to juggle (almost impossibly), the tension between work and home -- the boundaries are often blurred.
I often ask myself, what does it mean to be a good mother? Is it protecting our kids at all cost? Empowering them to live out their best life? Exposing them to all the opportunities life has to offer? Enriching their lives with everything and anything within our capability? Or is it as simple as just, being there, loving them, ensuring they are "happy". I haven't found the answer, but daily, I'm understanding them as individuals, and how each of them, unique as they are, liked to be loved best.
Abby is a words of affirmation girl, while Aaron is a physical touch boy. 18 months apart, but huge personality differences, as they say, "same same, but different".
Being a mother is a lonely journey, you can have a support group of friends who "know how you are feeling because they have been there before", but those words of comfort aren't able to "lend you a hand", and as much as a network of "emotional support" is key towards having a good quality of mental health, it truly takes a village to raise a child. From the routine, boring aspects of diapering, changing clothes, preparing meals, clothing them, comes the now additional stress from Home-Based-Learning or enrichments which require us to "sit next to our kids" since they are not yet of age to properly pay attention.
We have come quite a long way from those days where Aaron was in and out of clinics for silent reflux, and I'm glad those days are long over. The nights were long and intolerable and I sort of relived them last month when Aaron had a bout of Salmonella for over a month, my heart would race with anxiety whenever he would poo. Like Sherlock Holmes, I would be all over the poo, looking at it, stiffing it, snapping pics of it, then deciding whether or not he was on the road to recovery. I had sleepless night from the trauma of "soft poo".
And how does God come in to the equation again in all of this? Like a knight in shining armour that arrives only at the last minute (haha), my faith is yet tested again, like a whisper in my ear, "Do you trust me? You didn't think I'd come through, did you?" And I sheepishly, as a child caught with his hands in the candy jar, realize again, what a good Father He is. And He is holding everything together (even when I think something things are just held by a thread), He's got his fingerprints all over my kids life, over the journey of Motherhood, over our fragile, fragile hearts. And He's the master storyteller of our lives, and as lonely as this journey is, He is my greatest advocate and cheerleader.