Narratives@najahnasseri.org

When I was about 10, I entered a Vocabulary Bee. It’s a competition where words are given by a panel and you are asked what it means. I went quite far in the school district and at the finals, I lost because I couldn’t distinguish between “distinguish” and “extinguish”. A voice in my head told me the right answer, but the spotlight pushed me to go against my better judgement. And so it began, a string of events that pushed me to go against that little voice. Ha ha.

But back to vocabulary. Since then, I haven’t witnessed any vocabulary bees. All I’ve seen so far are spelling bees. Poor ones at that.

Vocabulary, as I have recently discovered during my 1-month stint as Adam’s reading drill sargeant last December, is very important in helping a child learn how to read. My earlier conventional assumption was that reading leads to vocabulary, when, like all things you learn when you take the time to remove your assumptions and start from scratch, it was the other way around. Sort of.

Adam read better when I equipped him with new words. He had the confidence to guess longer words within the right context and hence, wasn’t so stumped when the phonics method took a bit longer to figure out.

So it delighted me to no end to discover how well Idris has been doing with his vocabulary. Just the other day, when I asked him what he was doing, he replied that he was ‘looking for something unusual’. Revisiting old movies (old by a 4 year-old’s standards) led me to discover other words that he knew the meaning of – like when he narrated the starting bit of Transformers 1: “Look Ibu, the cube has just become a meteor” – as the cube entered the earth’s atmosphere.

At 3, Fische took him to an aquarium in Langkawi. He pointed out the anemone and the various fish moving about around it. He has pointed out the names of a few dinosaurs and am watching out to see if he uses the word ‘evaporate’ in the right context some time soon.

As parents, the natural reaction (I think it’s natural because so many parents do it), is to dumb down what we say to kids. I say, don’t dumb down the vocabulary, just make your explanations simpler. When Idris doesn’t understand a what a word means, he just asks what it is. And that increases his vocabulary, even before he learns how to read.

Reference for younger children: A Language Boosting Game for Hannan

I admit, living in Singapore, for me at least, is very close to living the life of a hermit. I’ve pretty much cut off myself from the rest of the world as I knew it and rebuilt my life around family. It wasn’t what I expected it to be and honestly, if you spoke to little girl Najah at 12 years old, she would’ve probably been disappointed. The visions of grandeur, brought about by what must have been a very feminist mother (I really don’t know, she kept a diary which my aunts claimed they burned after her death… grrrr!), was very very planned. The type of life, the type of career, the ages at which milestones must be achieved, was very very detailed and calculated.

But one thing my 12 year old self probably didn’t realise was that everyone yearns to be ‘centred’. You now, the feeling one gets when one is ‘home’, or ‘at peace’, or knows where they’re going. I guess we all go through various phases of this searching. One of my favourite Ustazs calls it ‘returning to Allah’. Whatever your spiritual leanings are, I believe that we all have an internal drive to reach a level of human perfection / a perfect state of being. Not to be confused with the street definition of being a perfectionist/particular, which to me, is a label for people who are generally fussy or obsessive compulsive.

At 35, I feel centred. I don’t feel like I’ve achieved what I need to achieve, but it’s like scaling a mountain and you reach this amazing plateau where you can see the heights that you’ve climbed. You take a short rest, you savour your position and the amazing view, you contemplate life’s little questions and then you look up and see the rest of your journey, unhindered by clouds, a magnificent path to the peak of your existence.

That’s what being 35 feels like to me.

And really, it’s not an individual climb. I’ve had great coaches. My parents, my siblings, my husband, my kids, my helpers (maid, nanny, anyone who has been in my ‘employment’ really), all have been exceptional teachers in their own way. Everyone has something to teach. Everyone has had their own way of supporting my climb. And I hope that their encounters with me has contributed in some way to theirs.

Oddly, I’ve been reading much about death. And thinking about it. Because my plateau was the same one my mother probably stood at a year before her death. Apparently, it’s a natural thing to do, for ‘motherless daughters’ to have this psychological hurdle at the age of their mother’s death. The great thing is, I don’t feel motherless. Ummi is a great role model. Serene in disposition, amazingly strong to withstand the person that is my father, sophisticated in thinking and very very soft at heart (I love the way she talks to animals, insects and all sorts of creatures. Very Mother Earth. No wonder birds have been building nests on our house!). She is part of my vision of my end point. Just like my very strong aunts and my amazing grandmother (to be able to smile and savour the joys of life after burying a husband and so many children, I’ve always thought that a lesser being would have gone crazy by now, but not her…). They painted a new picture of the peak that I’m heading to. Multifaceted, complicated women who at their core have found ways to make gold and diamonds from the straws of life.

We lost Yayi last week. Yayi, or Allahyarham Haji Ali bin Sardi, was my stepmother, Umi’s, father. He had weathered a brain operation a few years ago and survived a flood. His condition deteriorated though in the past few months. We were told that he passed away peacefully on Thursday night, or what we Muslim’s call Friday night – since the evening is the start of the next day. This is considered an auspicious time for a Muslim to pass away, alhamdulillah.

The thing about funerals is that there are lots of people around. That’s good. Yayi’s children were all buzzing around the kitchen, preparing to cook for the kenduri tahlil, and if one were not to pay any attention to their faces, one would think that it was Hari Raya, instead of a sombre event.

I later rushed to see my grandmother and aunt in Muar, who are both unwell. It was heartening to see that our surprise visit brought big smiles. That house used to be bustling with energy, but now the ‘heart’ of the house is unwell and it’s heartbreaking to see.

I ended up sleepless the other night because the last thing I watched was a TED talk by renown secularist, Sam Harris. I won’t go into details about the actual talk itself because I disagree with his opinions with regards to Islam, but there was a mental process that stuck with me.

He basically touched on morality and that the spectrum of right and wrong based on moral values shouldn’t as ambiguous as it currently is. He posits that there are and should be some basic rights and wrongs with regard to morality as it is related to the well-being of humanity as a whole.

Okay, so that’s something for another day. But it did get me thinking along the same line of logic, albeit for parenting and child development.

A friend lamented recently that her ambition to further her studies in the area of Montessori education met with some resistance from family members. It seems that for a Master’s holder, the job of raising other people’s kids is somewhat ‘beneath’ her. Plus it was assumed that anyone with a little common sense is seen to be qualified to raise kids and therefore, she need not spend the time, effort and money for a whole diploma program.

This wasn’t the first time I had heard of this. After I left my career to stay at home full time with the kids, I kept on getting questions about what I was “going to do with my life”. Then when I finally decided to equip myself with what Fische and I saw as the prerequisite knowledge for me to do what I wanted to do with my life at_that_point_in_time, it took a while to convince those around me that a course in early childhood was worthy of my time. People kept on looking for economical markers – like how much I could potentially make as a teacher, as a kindergarten principal or as a kindergarten operator, to justify the expense and the time. I was like a broken tape recorder whenever I explained to people that it’s for MY kids and whatever comes next will be determined after I figure out what I want to do with our kids. Fische saw the value of the course from the beginning – he’d pick me up from my weekly lectures, and we’d chat about what I learned that day and how we can apply it at home.

A few days ago, I chatted with Idris’ principal and she shared with me her experience when brainstorming about the venture – her hugely successful kindy/childcare. Their research suggested that the choice mothers make (it seemed mothers have more of a say in these things) when it comes to school was, for the most part, impulsive. Many base their choice on convenience, cost, how long they’d be free of their children, and what other people have to say about the school’s results, as well as their own childhood experiences.

The thing about preschool is other than the 3Rs, the foundation it lays for a child’s future will not be obvious until much further into the future. The course of a child’s development is something humanity has only begun to understand in recent time. Yet the discipline to do with early childhood has become a recognised science of sorts – there are good practices and bad practices and while we don’t know the full extent of our childcare practices today, we know a lot more than our grandparents did a decade ago (and in some respect, a lot less).

So it pains me to see, time and time again, people (parents/teachers/caregivers alike) resort to unsubstantiated logic to justify their opinions on how children should be raised. I’m not saying that all traditional methods are flawed – not surprisingly, those methods that are in tune with the mother’s instincts are often later proven to be beneficial. It is the flawed logic that came between the parents’ instincts that later on proved to be destructive – the campaign to promote formula milk a few decades ago came to mind, which lead to more babies being fed through bottles, which were propped up for convenience, resulting in choking hazards, and the lack of physical contact when being fed has been found to have psychological implications to the child later in life (trust issues with adults).

As a society, some flawed logic in child development gets propagated through the usual argument: “My parents did this to me (fill_in_the_blanks), but I turned out fine.” This could range from scare tactics to get you to sleep/eat/pray/study, to diet, to schooling choices, and a host of other aspects of a child’s life. Just because you turned out ‘OK’ (a very subjective measurement of personal development in itself), does not mean that it’s alright for a parent to use a lighter (or a host of other threats, the more common in our society being the sight of a cane) to scare a child into finishing his meal. Do we even question ourselves when we resort to these things?

The more important thing isn’t to make a list of what to do and what not to do. The recipe book is still being written on many things, so even between revisions of the “What to Expect” series, you’ll find some differences that can freak out a caring parent or two. But it is important to be mindful that parenting is not as subjective as we make it out to be. There are some established rights and wrongs. The balance between good hygiene and the need to develop a child’s immune system is one area where parents already know to seek professional advice. In terms of a child’s psychological development, there is a host of knowledge out there to start with, if only we would ask the right questions, and if only we weren’t too confident that we are OK.

Of late, there has been a flurry of movement within my circle of family and friends. Women going back to work. Women leaving careers to focus on family. Women getting domestic helpers to cope with their tasks at home, whether they’re focused full-time on the family or are juggling between a family and a career. Women getting their tubes tied.

Each time this happens, the ‘village’ will discuss, debate and put in their two cents worth on the move after weighing the pros and cons of the circumstances of the woman in question.

For the Muslims, we often fall back to the WWRD question (What would Rasulullah s.a.w. do?) and reams of paper would be used to provide comfort and guidance to the women via various opinions of the learned ulamas. What I’ve found missing in such regurgitations of information is context, which totally avoids the issue of the reality that the woman does not exist in isolation of partners and society in general.

Women today are called upon to be flexible. She should be able to raise a family, earn a living, get an education, teach her offsprings, balance her checkbook, maintain her looks for her spouse, be a great conversationist, be a mentor and a host of other things that she (or women collectively) has silently agreed to do by adapting time and time again to such roles. So it’s a huge slap on the face for womenkind when I read Suze Orman’s Women and Money as she described a woman’s relationship with money, and how despite the great leaps we’ve made, our shackles are still in our minds, especially with something as critical as personal finances.

How many of us know what we sign in a property transaction, a will, an insurance document or even when opening a bank account? I know of women who put so much inherent trust in their husbands that properties and loans are placed under their name without so much as a question on the terms and conditions on the said loans, and whether adequate protection is in place should something happen to the husband. Why is it that women are discouraged from asking how much a property is worth today, or how much the family as a whole earns and spends, which requires us to delve deep into the expenses of our spouse right from the point where the two parties decide to get married?

It is almost as if it’s a virtue to be in the dark about money. Ask a cousin, an aunt, a mother, a mother-in-law about the family investments and the reply you’ll get, about 75% (or more) of the time is: “Oh, my husband handles those things. I don’t care about it as long as we have enough. I’m not materialistic.”

Bleargh.

Too many times, women are left widows with no idea of what their husbands have been up to. The most unfortunate that I’ve seen found out that she was not the only ‘dependent’ upon the tragic death of her husband, which in the end, left her less than half of what little wealth that the husband had accumulated. At times, women are not so lucky and it’s not just wealth that’s left behind, but a mountain of debt. Even if we are still earning our own living (I hate this term, especially when one is married because it implies that a non-earning spouse is leeching off the earning spouse, but that’s another topic for another day), do we really want to spend the rest of our lives paying for mistakes that could have been avoided had we been a bit more concerned and open about money?

So with that, and the first chapter of the book tucked in my mind, I embrace and applaud my lovely feminist, money-minded sisters who take a chapter out of the book of the Japanese wife (I was told they’re quite adept at managing the family finances). You are being responsible to yourselves and your family – nevermind what traditionalists think or say of you.

p.s. This is a reminder to myself as I pore over the guidebook to Borang M. @$%@$^@%$&@