Sons

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Sons are the anchors of a mother’s life.
– Sophocles, Greek playwright

My son and I fight a lot. He was always a daddy’s boy from the time he was a toddler. We would both come home from work and he would run to his daddy’s arms, and I used to be … “oh, ok then”.

The cute grumpy baby transitioned into a cute grumpy little boy who would question everything that did not include his sister. “But what about Akka (sister)?” was the quite often plaintive cry if he was denied anything or scolded for something. She HAD to be involved on equal terms, even if he was in the wrong.

He took a long time speaking coherently, and while the rest of us had trouble understanding him, his translator would be his big sister, who has continued the tradition of translating for him through the years, evolving from incoherent words to unexpressed emotions.

From the age of 12, I got him to intern in my office every year during the school holidays for at least a month, and paid him a full fresh graduate salary, telling him that will be his pocket money for whatever extra games, toys and stuff he wanted to buy. He would get so mad at me for that, and would accuse me of child labour. In retrospect, he knows it built both his character and confidence.

To overcome his stutter and a certain lisp when he spoke, I got him enrolled in debate classes and I remember him getting really angry with me because he did not want to go. I pushed him anyway, knowing that he had to face his greatest weakness and make it his greatest strength – and I was right. He eventually became part of the World Debate Championships, representing Malaysia and even got Number 1 at a national level public speaking competition.

I guess he grudgingly came to love his mother over the years, though he did not always show it. We had what you may call at best, a strained relationship, though there were times the sun would come shining through the clouds.

The divorce was hardest on him as he was the younger of the two siblings and he wanted both parents together, not separate. It made him grow up too fast at the age of 14, wanting desperately to able to do something for the family that was left – his sister and I. He decided he had to be the Man of the house and it was frustrating trying to be that and also study for exams and be a teenager having no income.

I did not understand that struggle of his then, as I was too embroiled in my own struggles of overcoming my multiple challenges, the main one being not to drown under the avalanche of emotional and business trauma.

We both had a long journey of struggling through our individual and intertwined paths. When the paths clashed, there would be a resonance of fire. We were both too alike with too much vulnerability. I look back and understand that we both hid that vulnerability very well, in various facades that gave off an entirely different impression and did not speak about it. We side-stepped issues that required facing, so when tensions flared, we would both erupt like runaway trains, disproportionate to the issue at hand.
It is a vicious cycle.

He grew up seeing his father flying off the handle in rage and getting violent, it leaves a subliminal message that he too should react like that.

And I, traumatised by his father’s rages and manipulative narcissism which I only begin to understand now that I am out of the relationship for years, would immediately react against his body language and see the worst in him. And not that he is just a confused young boy trying to be the best version of a man he thinks he should be.