As each year comes to a close, I always get a shock to realise how quickly 365 days can pass and melt into a brand new year. 2015 has been a heavy year of transitions and unexpected twists and turns. 2016 is the year I officially enter my twenties, the age with a big looming question of “who do you want to be?”

It’s been absolutely nerve-wrecking to feel as if every door I open and path I choose to take would determine who I become, so I decided to talk to close friends about this, people standing at similar crossroads of their life. I asked about how they chose their college/course and what they aspire to be when they graduate but the most illuminating conversation I’ve had was with my dear mother.

Due to our conservative Asian background, our relationship was never characterised by intimate heart-to-heart talks or intense contemplations about life. So all these years while I was growing and struggling to figure out my purpose and my dreams, I never really thought of asking what hers were as a young adult or even right now. Did she aspire to change the world in some way? Did she ever want to paint or start a business or write a book? Did she dream of becoming like a person she looks up to?

She laughed at my questions then answered plainly that she did not have the privilege to dream back then nor did she have any particular passion in anything she could pursue. “We grew up during the war. We were happy just to have food on the table and shelter over our heads.” She pulled out stories from the fondest memories of her own childhood and young adult years, explained that my grandmother baked, sewed and struggled immensely to get her and her siblings through the poverty-stricken period of World War II. Later on, she stopped schooling after her O levels and took up a basic administrative job so she could start raising our family.

I barely remember any of these but she told me that back then, I was one of seven little children running around the house screaming and quarrelling, falling sick, refusing to do our homework… There was my brother and I, three cousins whose parents divorced, and another child whom she took in for a while as his parents weren’t able to be around. The entire house was constantly in a state of chaos.

From many of her nostalgic recounts of the past, I came to realise with much respect and awe how mightily she loved and took care of every single one of us – almost as if we were all her own children. She understood the various nuances of our characters and how we interacted with each other – who was most diligent, who was likely to try to skip school, who was picky about food, who would hide the pills under the bed. She stood by with us through difficult, trying periods and she always gave us support and freedom even if she disagreed. She managed to forge such intimate relationships with us while juggling a full-time job, just like my grandmother. 

Slowly and eventually, all of us grew up, forged our careers and moved out, with me being the youngest and the last one to stand fully on my own. Although we’ve grown apart, we always come together again because of and for my mother on various festive occasions. It was in that precious moment during our gathering as she flitted around asking everyone about their lives and giving out gifts that I realised how all she genuinely wanted and felt contented with was for us to grow up to become good people happy with our lives.

Perhaps in society’s terms, my mother is a simple and average person. She does not paint or play superb badminton or hike mountains. She is not a leader of a community or a founder of any project. Her name will not be recorded in any book or wall and continued in generations to come. But in that one aspect of being a mother, she has put her heart and soul into and made an impact on each of us in profoundly life-changing ways. We are her greatest achievement and joy. She’s the burning sun at the very centre of our galaxy, shining tirelessly every day to provide us with warmth, light and energy, holding each of us in a delicate orbit.

She’s shown me just one thing I need to navigate through a decade filled with uncertainty, important life-changing decisions and the grappling of my personal sense of identity – that our school and job, our dreams and accomplishments are not and should not be the things, or the only things, that make us. We are also the people we love, what we believe strongly in and all the nameless but priceless dedications we make each step of the way. Those are the intangible aspects that makes us us the way we had made her her.