Mother’s Romance by Jessica Sng

Mother’s Romance by Jessica Sng

 

 I. Meeting

“Girl, greet Uncle Tan!” my mother chirped, far too happily for my liking.

My gaze followed hers as I looked up at the man my mother had brought home, towering over my 11-year-old self. Wisps of grey, thinning hair clung to the top of his head in a persistent but ultimately futile effort to preserve any remnants of youth. While he was not what one would describe as ‘fat’ per se, my eyes still took note of the rotund belly stretching against his yellow polo shirt and spilling over his belt, the wide-set hands freckled with age spots, the thick arms, and most of all, the over-sized, horn-rimmed glasses. Unflattering images of overenthusiastic bees swarmed my mind as I observed him in a brief, sullen silence, before I uttered a quick “Uncle Tan.”

“Hi, hi,” he greeted back, in equal awkwardness.

It wasn’t that I had never met him before. Quite the contrary – my mother and I had often done weekend outings with him, whether to the nearby coffee shop stalls or for our frequent visits to Suntec City, where they would shop at FairPrice while I was left alone at the now non-existent EPB bookstore. But either because of innocence or just plain stupidity, I never questioned the relationship they shared beyond what I thought to be mere friendship. No, not even when he bought me a set of expensive DVDs I never would have been able to afford with a month’s worth of pocket money. Or his regular treats to desserts or chicken wings or any manner of unhealthy foods I was helpless to resist.

Back then, he was simply Uncle Tan; the friendly, generous, funny man my mother made friends with during her Resident Committee meetings.

After my mother broke the news though, he became just an old man who had intruded into my peaceful, single-parent family when he had no right to. Knowing my mother had a boyfriend changed everything; it robbed me of the monopoly over the only parent I had.

“You suck,” I muttered under my breath, as they turned away chattering. I wasn’t sure whom I was directing the words at though.

 

II. Good friends

“Wah, serious?” my friend exclaimed.

“Ya.” The school bus was hurtling at full speed ahead, the noise of its engine mingling with the chattering of students despite the bus aunty’s regular screeches for silence. Her shouts grated on my ears and made my bus journeys home needlessly unpleasant, but at least it meant that my conversations with my school bus partner, Kali, usually went unheard.

“It’s damn irritating lah,” I continued to grumble. “Yesterday my mum keep telling me to ‘hurry up, hurry up’ and get ready because Uncle Troll was waiting for us in his car downstairs. Why? Because she’s scared he’ll get angry if he needs to wait too long.”

Kali shook her head and made a couple of indignant noises that she probably knew I wanted to hear. I spent the rest of the time bashing every single aspect of Uncle Troll’s existence, from his oversized glasses to his horrible loafers. Most of all, I relished in my exaggerations of the sickly-sweet manner my mother would adopt whenever in his presence.

“Eeee,” Kali responded appropriately. We stuck our tongues out and feigned gagging noises, laughing hysterically afterward.

The bus soon rolled to a stop on the road beside my HDB block. Through the window, I could see my maid already waiting for me on the pavement.

“Just don’t talk at all whenever he comes over, okay?” Kali advised, as a parting shot. “Just show a black face and show your mum you are Not. Happy.”

“Yeah, definitely,” I promised her. I hopped off the bus and walked alongside my maid, in infinitely better spirits than when I first heard of my mum’s relationship status. Although I could never pinpoint what Uncle Tan actually did to make him so loathsome in my eyes, it never mattered to me so long as I could use my bus conversations as a catharsis for my frustrations.

As long as I could use laughter and jeers to hide my own fears about no longer being the number one priority in my mother’s life, I had no reason to think any deeper about their relationship. It was unnecessary, it was annoying, and it was utterly, utterly gross.

 

III. Silence

For the next few months, I did exactly what I said I would – ignoring the very existence of Uncle Tan.

It didn’t matter how often he came over to my house, or how my mother insisted on taking me along whenever they did lunch dates. Neither did it matter how often he would treat me to desserts that I never asked for in the first place. It certainly didn’t matter how Uncle Troll managed to tease and make my mother laugh in ways I was never able to. Innocuous sighs and eye-rolling on my part usually accompanied those moments, as I mentally retched at all the lovey-dovey boo-boo polluting the air every time they interacted.

Nevertheless, my immaturity had its limits. However much I sulked, I still lived in imminent fear of my mother’s temper, which never hesitated to rear its head whenever I really stepped out of line. This was made clear when once, I slammed the back door of her car in a wordless, seething tantrum, as we were about to leave for yet another excursion with her boyfriend.

“Don’t do that again,” she snapped, punctuating her words enough to cut.

Inwardly cowering under her glare, but still unwilling to admit total defeat, I pressed my lips together and turned away without an apology. Uncle Troll was buckling his seatbelt in the driver’s seat. I was sure he noticed our little spat, even if he kept his back towards me and never said a word. An awkward silence followed as we drove off, although some relief washed over me when radio music began to play. Feeling slightly abashed but still irritated, I fumed from my seat in the back at the injustice of having a ban on my rights to freedom of expression.

Not surprisingly, moments like this further encouraged me to keep my mouth shut. It was a poor form of rebellion, but it was the only way I knew how to reject their attempts to buy my acceptance.

Thankfully, my friend Kali was only too happy to cheer me along the sidelines. She was the sort of friend I liked and needed very much at the time. She laughed at all my stories; of how Uncle Troll spilled curry all over his clothes last Sunday like a dumbass, or how I once spied on him picking his nose, or how hopeless he was with the most basic computer functions. Most of all, she heartily approved of my admirable sense of pride when I told her how I always upheld my stony appearance, even while listening to Uncle Troll’s jokes (which were actually rather good, but that was besides the point).

But no matter how much I tried not to dwell on it, a small part of me acknowledged that most people wouldn’t see this as healthy peer support. But I didn’t want anything healthy or mature; I only wanted someone to whom I could vent to without being condemned as selfish and unreasonable.

And so, my campaign of silence continued for the whole year. I read books, played games on my phone, or sat with my arms folded when forced into the presence of my mother and her boyfriend. Neither of them seemed to pay much attention to this. I supposed I was glad about that – at least I wasn’t forced to answer any difficult questions.

However, giving the silent treatment couldn’t last forever. One night, when I went to the spare bedroom to look for a new towel, I saw the two of them sitting on the bed, hugging each other. They didn’t do anything else beyond that – at least, nothing enough to scar the minds of innocent children. But a dead weight settled in my stomach nonetheless, although I couldn’t pinpoint what exactly it was about seeing them like that that hit me so hard.

They spotted me almost immediately after I barged in, so it was too late to back out discreetly. “Towel,” was all I could mutter, before grabbing it off the hook and running back to my own room. Once my door was securely locked, I promptly threw myself onto my bed and started to cry.

I didn’t fully understand why. Perhaps it was because witnessing the affectionate display confirmed to me that my mum had well and truly found someone else more important than I was. After all, I’d never seen her hug anyone that fiercely besides me.

For once, I didn’t confess something about my mum’s boyfriend to Kali. In fact, I gradually stopped talking about their relationship at all. This worked out well – for all our bus rides, Kali would never ask about it first unless I steered the conversation in that direction. I didn’t want to admit that I’d been living in a state of denial for the whole year. I suppose it was rather like being forced to finally swallow a large dose of bitter medicine. The sight of my mother and Uncle Troll together left an extremely unpleasant aftertaste… and yet, I realized I was actually beginning to accept the situation at last.

I didn’t accept him, for sure. But I was coming to resign myself to my mother being in a relationship I had no part of, no matter how much I’d tried to reject it. This notion tasted of defeat for some time, but eventually, a strange calmness started to replace the usual mix of disgust and annoyance whenever I was with the couple.

My policy of silence continued. But the meaning of it had begun to change.

 

IV. Married Man

It was during midnight when I saw it happen.

I was supposed to be already asleep, like a good kid in primary school. I went to bed promptly at 10pm, but lied awake until past midnight as usual.

Just as when I was about to finally drift off, I heard murmurs outside my room, footsteps shuffling, and the opening and closing of the main door in the hall. A slight unease crept over me as I wondered where my mother and Uncle Troll could have gone to at this time of night. I tried to drift off again, but to no avail.

Soon, I heard muffled shouts coming from downstairs. Sound always travelled with ease around my flat – hearing cats yowling or rowdy teenagers yelling at night weren’t unusual. But the shouts this time didn’t seem to be any of those things, and it took several minutes before I realized the shouts belonged to a woman.

Anxiety blooming in my chest, I tossed off my blankets and pulled back the window curtains to see what was happening. At first, I couldn’t see anyone, no matter how much I craned my neck. Just as I was about to go into the hall and peer out of the window there instead, a man and two women emerged from the void deck into plain view.

My heart constricted when I recognized the man and one of the women as Uncle Troll and my mother. I didn’t know the other woman. It seemed she was the one in hysterics. My mother backed away as the woman continued to yell, while Uncle Tan held out his hands as if to pacify her. My breath caught in my throat as I saw the woman land a clumsy hit on my mother’s back, but Uncle Tan grabbed her arms while my mum ran behind him.

I thought about waking my maid, who was no doubt snoring softly in the next room without a care in the world, but decided against it. The scene unfolding below was too raw, almost obscene in its display of uncontrolled emotion. My stomach lurched when I realized that some other HDB inhabitants were probably staring from their windows at the spectacle, like I was.

Uncle Tan managed to calm the woman down enough to cease her fit, although her voice remained shrill when she spoke. I strained my ears, but I couldn’t make out the exact words. I continued to observe as my mother and Uncle Tan lingered around the woman, who had crouched down into a squatting position, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet.

It was highly unsettling to see a full-grown adult acting like one of the Primary 1 babies in my school whenever something bad happened. The two other adults probably felt the same, as they hovered uncertainly around the crouching woman.

I soon got sick of staring at them, so I closed the curtains and snuggled back under my blankets. Wide-awake, I stared up at the ceiling and recalled what I’d just witnessed with sickening clarity. Although I was scared, I couldn’t say I was surprised at all. It wasn’t like I hadn’t already suspected it for a while.

I don’t remember when my suspicions started to develop. It just started with little things. For example, I noticed my mother making more frequent late-night phone calls. She started to have late-night conversations with my maid too, something that never happened before. On impulse, I even checked my mother’s phone when she was in the shower once, and came across a series of long, heartfelt messages from Uncle Troll. Before, I would have sneered at the mushy words and regaled yet another piece of trivia to Kali. This time, however, the words ‘i will do my best’, or ‘we’ll definitely work something out’ reminded me uncomfortably of the desperate or even dying messages I saw in TV serials.

Of course, none of this made sense at first. But after eavesdropping on multiple conversations and inferring from bits and pieces I heard my mother say over the phone sometimes, I put together a vague picture for myself of what was going on. It wasn’t a pretty one.

If my guesses were correct, Uncle Tan was still married to another woman. It seemed that they were already on the verge of divorce when he started dating my mother. But judging by what I’d seen and heard, that obviously didn’t matter to his lawful wife.

I did my best to convince myself that I had to be wrong, that things like that only happened in Taiwanese dramas. After all, other than those discreet signs, there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary. My mother nagged and fussed over me as usual. Uncle Tan accompanied us on Saturday outings to Suntec City like he always did. For a while, I managed to ignore those niggling thoughts as I got swept up in more important matters, like convincing my mother I absolutely did not need extra tuition, despite my falling grades in Mathematics.

But now, it felt like another slap back into reality. A bubble of resentment rose up in me as I heard the two of them come into the house again, thinking how stupid adults really were. Several names for women who were with technically still-married men floated across my mind, which I remembered from all the dramas I’d seen before. I thought of my mother and Uncle Tan, and a wave of nausea took hold.

I never asked my mother about it. No one offered any information either. My habitual silence around my mother and Uncle Tan was a great asset to me at times like this, since by now, no one was expecting me to act cheerful or talkative around them.  Strangely, I didn’t feel any of the old dislike towards Uncle Tan, which should have intensified after discovering the truth about him. Indifference persisted where contempt should have been, even after witnessing that scene near the void deck. All I hoped was for none of their mess to screw up my own life, which was troublesome enough as it was. Juggling homework and my very problematic social circle of friends were plenty vexing already.

However, my apathy was put to the test a few times. One evening, I was on the bus with my aunt, whom my mother and I were going to have dinner with. After a semi-serious conversation with my mum, to which I paid no attention to, my aunt turned to look at me sitting next to her.

“How would you feel,” she started. “If Mummy got married?”

I froze. My thumb hovered above the arrows on my Gameboy for a second, before I said, as casually as possible:

“Dunno. Never thought about it.”

“Ohhh,” my aunt replied.

Yeah, now shut up about it, I thought.

Thankfully, she did. My mother, sitting opposite the aisle, mentioned a new promotion FairPrice was having, which distracted my aunt well enough. I redoubled my efforts in leveling up my Charmander in Pokemon: Red, hitting the ‘A’ button more times than necessary.

I hoped that my aunt’s question wasn’t a sign of impending doom. The idea of having a lawful stepfather was unbearable. It destroyed everything I identified myself and was comfortable with – contrary to what mainstream media blathered about, I liked my single-parent family of two. I didn’t need a father, biological or otherwise. Especially not one who couldn’t even sort out his first family before barging into my family life.

“Die, die, die,” I muttered in a dark monotone, crushing my Pokemon enemies with vengeance.

 

V. New start

A few weeks passed before I heard that my mother and Uncle Tan had broken up.

My mother hadn’t been specific; she only remarked that Uncle Tan was not going to be coming around anymore, after which I never saw him again. How she felt about the split is still a mystery to me. At least nothing serious happened after the void deck incident, hence putting my fears of further repercussions by the woman – or worse, my mother getting married – to rest. Graduation from primary school went peacefully enough, without family issues plaguing my efforts for the PSLE.

I was in Secondary 3 before my mother started dating again, a relationship that has lasted till today. She met him during her time in the church choir, and introduced him to me much in the same way she did with Uncle Tan. I wasn’t exactly delighted, but the same kind of antagonism didn’t gnaw at me as before.

Moving through junior college and university expanded my personal priorities, to the point when I realized that I was actually happy my mother had found a companion after all. Admittedly, this feeling wasn’t entirely altruistic. My mother having a partner inevitably meant having some of her attention diverted from me, meaning she had less opportunity to nag me about inanities as before. As I occupied myself with heavier schoolwork, church activities, and part-time jobs, my craving for her attention cooled by a large degree. I began to enjoy the times she was out with her boyfriend and I had the house to myself. At the very least, I got to spend more time alone in my room browsing the Internet, since she was often too busy canoodling with her new boyfriend in the hall.

Despite my change in perspectives, my attitude towards my mother’s new boyfriend didn’t quite do a 180-degree turnabout. Our typical conversations go like this:

 

“Hey Jess. Where’s your mum?”

“I think she went to buy dinner or something.”

“Orhh, okay. Tell her to call me back.”

“Yeah, sure. Bye.” Click.

 

For sure, he and I aren’t close. I still don’t have any need nor want for a surrogate father. Nevertheless, I’m glad my mother found someone after raising me on her own for over 20 years, especially since I didn’t make it an easy time for her.

Sometimes, I still wonder what prompted my mother to make those choices with Uncle Tan. There doesn’t seem to be much point bringing up with the subject with her now, but I always thought it was common sense to get with a guy only after he’s legally separated. Then again, maybe love really does have a way of making common sense fly out of the window. Who knows? I don’t have any first-hand experience, and I’m not sure if I ever want to.

I also wonder if her dubious history and questionable tastes in men (my biological father being one of them) is why she almost never encourages me to snag a boyfriend, or make a huge deal about my future marriage prospects. This, apparently, is uncommon behavior for many mothers, if I believe half of what some of my girlfriends say about their mothers.

Not that I’m complaining, of course. If my love life is going to be anything like my mother’s, I’m probably better off planning life ahead with my best friend as a roommate and filling our home with cats.