:: Litmus ::

12.39, this afternoon, at a local coffee joint―Ya Kun, in case details like these are necessary to the setting of the scene: marble table tops, polished wood, splashes of red, middle-aged ladies with their proverbial salon-treated hair, patterned coffee cups fashioned after those used in the 50s, plastic spoons, kaya toasts with slabs of melting butter, the magpie chatter of the lunch-time crowd, and a surprisingly mild April sky (I think of Robert Herrick's ode to daffodils!).

My mother: the stitches holding the gaping wound on her forehead has just been removed. We had a kindly doctor from Raffles Medical, in itself a tiny miracle: 'It's you, I swear,' I tell her, smiling, as I dissect the soggy French toast for her into bite-sized pieces. 'I always get the grumpy nurses and the frigid doctors.' She looks at me, amused, and then tosses out a joke in Cantonese.

We giggle companionably over our coffees―black for her, unsweetened by anything except her cheerful acceptance of her pain, and thick with milk for me, weighed down by the stickiness of anxiety.

I watch my mother: her right hand is swollen to an alien paw. The displaced vein throbs with greenish anger. I watch her face: it's not beautiful like the porcelain pale dolls peering back at you from a magazine, no―see, half of my mother's face is dragged down by the slack of paralysed nerves, ashes of a ghost illness ten years ago. And her eyes are faded with the dimness of age. There is nothing aesthetic about her sallow cheeks; why, even those flashing dimples that have once captured my father's heart are hidden in the fragile folds of her skin. She is slight, so slight, like an autumn leaf browned by time. There is nothing fashionable about her haircut―doll-faced cut, China bangs, now swept up by a bobby pin to expose the gauze taped to her wounds like a mayday call―in fact, there is nothing fashionable about her at all. She's wearing a neat short-sleeved shirt and a pair of old jeans. Her only accessory is a pair of reading glasses strung by a sensible chain looped around her neck.

That, and the clearest, most infectious laughter I have ever known.
That, and the strongest, kindest spirit I have ever seen.

'Why did you marry him?' I ask, stirring my coffee like a witch's brew. Toil and trouble!
She nibbles thoughtfully on a piece of toast. 'Humm. He was tall.'
We giggle again: she's a masterpiece of girlishness when she so chooses to be. And I am a caricature of womanhood, strangled with effort just to be sometimes.
'There were a few others,' she confides.
'I'm sure,' I say, and we both remember her: olive skin, sparkling eyes, a beautiful smile and an earthy sensuality that needed neither powder nor pearls to shine.
'But I only felt for your father. Do you know what I mean?' A rhetorical question―she knows I know. Yes. Love, that heart-throbbing disease. The cruel leap of flames: Cupid's arrow and Venus's blessings, that tangy sweetness so sharp it borders on acid. That errant power that makes you and breaks you and takes you. Yes, mother, I know.

We are done with our lunch. 'Sam and I used to come here,' I volunteer with an idiot grin.
My mother holds my hand. Her calloused palms are sandpaper warmth. 'I wish him all the best,' she says with maternal resignation.
I stand over my mother, a sentinel of sentiment, and I see the grey hairs peeking out like poppy seedlings on top of her head. 'Me too.'
She holds me a little tighter and we walk to get a taxi. Her 2 o'clock appointment with the reconstructive specialist (such a pretty name for a bone doctor, we note dryly!) is looming close.

'Do you want to―'
'Get the kids some―'
'Sweets?' We say at the same time. We grin with irrelevant happiness. Because you see, there is nothing to be happy about: my mother is still rapt with pain, and I am still wrecked with anxiety, and there is still a whole opera-worthy melodrama spinning like a web of sulphur around us. But then, you see―can you see?―for me, there is so much happiness packed in a little exchange like this with my mother, because there is no bigger fortune than the fact that she is mine, that she is here, and that she is well enough to giggle with me as we walk to get the kids some sweets before her doctor's appointment.

***

Have you done your litmus test? How much how well how often do you love your mother?