Remembering my mother

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. I never knew there was such a day when my mother was still alive. And even if I knew, I would not have cared much anyway. It’s just another modern day invention to allocate one day to remember the person who gave birth to us while for the other 364 days of the year she is treated like she never existed. Then again once in a while, thoughts of mother do come to our mind as we deal with trials and tribulations of bringing up our own children.

My mother’s time in this world ended on the same day as for the last Agong who died on the throne. While the whole Malaysia was mourning the loss of a people’s King, I was grieving the passing of my own mother. While all radio and television stations stopped entertainment programmes and played Quranic recital instead, our family also had tahlil to pray for her soul to be placed with those who are blessed. That sad day 8 years ago, is long gone. And my own family has grown so much since then.

With all the comfort and convenience that we live in today, it’s difficult to imagine how hard it was for a single mother to bring up 4 young children but that’s what my mother did. I was too young to remember, but I was told she separated from my father when I was only five and my younger sister was two. We were brought up by her own mother (my maternal grandmother) as she had to go away from the village to tap rubber trees on the hills of interior Kelantan, and later work in sawmills in the interior of Pahang. I can’t remember exactly how often she came back to visit us and grandmother, but I remember we were more attached to grandmother because of the separation.

While living in Pahang around the late 70s, she married a man who later became the father of my younger brothers. By the time I was sent to sekolah asrama in 1982 she gave birth to my youngest brother. Her husband, my stepfather, ran off months after my brother was born and never came to visit us again. Life had always been difficult for her, and it took a turn for the worse. That was the time my mother, a divorced 33 year old woman, penniless and jobless with four young kids, without a man in her life had to go through a difficult journey into the future on her own. From then on she never left home to work in foreign places. I guess she felt she had left me and my sister for too long and that from then on she wanted to bring up her children by herself. She never remarried again until her death 19 years later.

When I was learning to be an adult at the sekolah asrama, I understood early on why mother could not visit me that often. The journey from home to the asrama must have been difficult for her, perhaps even more so when she thought about not being able to leave as much money as she wanted to if she visited. Instead, I was the one making my trip home once in a while to see mother and my younger siblings.

I remember to this day, one weekend I went back to the kampung. Moments before I left home to take my bus trip back to the asrama, my mother went into the bedroom and closed the door. Later, not knowing what she was doing in there, I opened the bedroom door and found her counting coins on the house wooden floor careful not to let the coins slip through the gap between the planks. I saw the bamboo piggy-bank which she had been saving the coins in was broken in halves. She said to me she had to break it to get her only savings as she did not have any money left. All she had was the coins. She asked if I would not mind carrying the heavy coins around and told me to be careful not to drop them. I looked at her and held back my tears. I did not want to show her my sadness and I suspect she was concealing hers too. I can’t remember what I spent the money on but that small incident is still etched on my memory to this day. It was one of the defining moments in my growing up teenage life. One among many which helped to teach me early on the importance of being prudent with money. To be honest even now while writing this, I have to take a breather, hold back my tears and pretend to be strong just in case my kids come barging into my study room without knocking.

I did not have the courage to tell my mother all this when she was still alive. I wish I had told her how thankful I was about all the sacrifices that she had made to bring up the four of us. If your mother is still alive please do tell her how much she has done in your life. If you didn’t have time to do it in the last 364 days, tomorrow is a good day to say it.

Happy Mother’s Day!

9 May 2009

As a law-abiding Malaysian citizen, I, together with 2 million others filed my tax return within days before the deadline. The e-filing was overall convenient although I had to wake up at 4.30am in the morning to avoid slow server problem as many other taxpayers were also rushing to file in their tax returns. This is a tremendous improvement from the pre-e-filing days when I either had to submit it a few days before the deadline or go to the LHDN office myself to meet the deadline.

As the amount of tax that I pay grows by the year, I become more incensed by the gross wastage of money by some of our decision makers. They treat our hard earned money as their entitlement spending millions on expensive overseas “lawatan sambil belajar” trips. Some even brought his family and maid to Disneyland under the pretext of learning how to run a theme park, while some others charged half a billion “consultancy” fee for procuring some expensive foreign made weaponry. And yet, we the rakyat, are asked to tighten our belt to weather the current economic downturn.

One way to avoid our money from being squandered by these scoundrels is to pay all of our tax in the form of zakat. Although I’m not sure how transparent the zakat institution operate, and how much of the money actually goes to the right people, at least we can be sure our money will not go into financing somebody’s shopping trip to Harrods or to some middlemen trying to sell expensive toys to the government. And you can give it to any zakat institution that you feel comfortable with. I myself have been contributing my zakat to the Kelantan Islamic Religious Council since 6 or 7 years ago. No narrow Kelantan-centric chauvinism here. I believe people from rural Kelantan need more help than people from urban Selangor or KL. Since I’m not contributing directly to the economic development of the state in which I spent the first 20 years of my life, this is my way of “repaying” it.