I want to be like her

“Not flesh of my flesh
Nor bone of my bone
But still miraculously my own
Never forget for a single minute
You didn’t grow under my heart
But in it”

- Anonymous.

Mak did not become a mother in the conventional way. She also did not get her three kids through adoption. She never gave birth to any of us – but she became our mother in every other sense when Ayah married her more than twenty years ago.

No, I guess none of us have ever seen her as our stepmother – she’s simply Mak. She married Ayah when she was in her thirties, the right age for a mother with kids our age, ranging from three to nine.

Things changed as soon as Mak entered our lives. My brothers and I had been under our paternal grandparents’ care in Kulim since Ayah’s divorce. In my case – I’d been raised up more by Tok and Tok Ayah compared to staying with my own parents since I was a baby. When Mak insisted that all of us should move and live together in Petaling Jaya and Ayah obliged, I supposed Abang and I were most affected by the transfer.

It wasn’t that easy adapting to having a proper mother and going back to school in a new place. Abang and I had missed school for almost a year following Ayah’s divorce – Ayah felt that there was not much point when we kept bouncing from one school to another. When we were in Kulim, where my grandparents lived, our biological mother would came over and forced us to go back to Sg Petani with her. Yes, forced – sometimes she had to ask for assistance from a few teachers to practically hauled us into the car before she could drove us to Sg Petani. Whenever we were in Sg Petani though, Ayah would came to pick us up after school and we would happily entered the car and returned home to Kulim. After a few repeated similar incidents, Ayah stopped sending us to school and instead taught us at home – with the aid of many exercise books and TV Pendidikan.

But of course, off-and-on home tutoring by my father did little in preparing us for a new adventure in Petaling Jaya. Our Kedahan accent was obvious and we knew little English – when it was a norm for other pupils to converse in English in that urban school. Once I got 19/100 for an English test and I got teased all the time for my ‘weird’ accent. However, I managed to make some friends who did not mind my accent and my poor English and the fact that I wore baju kurung and tudung when most girls my age were more often clad in pinafores.

Life changed in so many ways as for the first time in my life I learned to know what it felt like to have a mother around. Yes, prior to that, Tok was the one who raised me up – fed me, made sure I bathed twice a day, sent me to learn Al-Quran after school, scolded me when I misbehaved. But it was only after Mak came into my life, I learned that a mother’s duty, among others, was to ensure that homework was done on time, Al-Quran recital was checked and corrected, school uniforms were cleaned and neatly pressed daily, extra books were bought to increase our interest in lessons learned at school, all meals were prepared and taken accordingly, and ensure that time was spent to listen to our worries and insecurities, to smooth our anxieties, to calm us from our fears, to kiss and make our wounds better and not laughed out loud when the 10-year-old daughter was such a coward that she insisted on somebody to wait right outside the bathroom whenever she took a shower.

Mak took time to teach us English, purchased and read story books by Enid Blyton to us and answered our endless queries on new words. Mak personally made sure that we could read and khatam the Quran by the age of twelve, at the latest. Mak spent some time after work to get to know our friends personally when she let us invited them over to have tea or play ping-pong at our house.

As we grew older and not much wiser in our teenage years, Mak helped us settling disputes whenever crisis arose at school. Both Abang and I got into some trouble with our teachers when we each reached sixteen. Ayah quickly blamed us for it – but Mak lend her ears to us, to find out our side of stories. She was the strong anchor that held us together whenever my brothers and I felt rebellious at Ayah’s conservative way of handling things. Mak was the one we ran to, who would supply endless patience, wisdom and love as only a true mother could.

Just like any true mothers, we had our moments of disagreements too – but all mothers should be allowed to have their moments of weaknesses, of having insecurities and despair in bringing up their kids, right?

As we grow even older and supposedly more mature as young adults, Mak continued to be our major consultant in seeking ideas and perspectives. Abang goes to Mak for advices on this and that as a self-entrepreneur. Adik, now a University student, who was a toddler when Mak first welcomed us as her children, still runs to Mak for guidance and opinions.

As for me – Mak is just the person I want to be like when I grow older.