Mother Figure

I thought I was not going to complain but hey this has gone too far. For the past couple of weeks, it was my destiny to meet two powerful figures, both mothers, whose sons were King's scholarship grantees. Of course, I have nothing against the King's scholarship, as it was established back hundred years ago and loads of people having this have done good to the country.

But seeing these mommies flexing their muscles just gave me creeps.

I had a chance to meet the first mother when her son was interested in what I was doing in my professional avatar. Of course she couldn't stop when she had a chance to brag about her son, but at least she had a modicum of intellect to disguise it quite well in a veneer of recognising her son's success. But what I couldn't understand was that after our talk she did take hold of her son's hand and lead him around like he's a soulless moron. Come on! Your son's got King's scholarship. You should let him get a life, an independent one at that. Maybe she forgot that the mother didn't live forever, but there'll be someday in the future that he'll have no one to guide him. Well, that's when the role will be relegated to the wife, I guess.

As I left from the first couple, hoping that my life couldn't fare any worse, fate led me to meet another power-lust mother, this time in a one-woman show without her son. It was a PEN event where they announced short-listed winners and her son happened to be one of them. Sadly, he's in the States and "couldn't find a flight back" so she needed to jump onto the stage herself, blabbering away about her son's magisterial (almost god-like) capabilities. To the audiences' dismay, she talked about how she became a person who distracted him from his study and persuaded him to go to a concert instead. We all knew that she tried to trick everyone into thinking how humbly she tried to portray all this, that her son was good at dancing apart from studying to become a meteorologist. In the end, I felt embarrassed for her that I decided to leave prematurely, even though the novel her son wrote was one of my favourite in the list. It's a shame that he couldn't make it. But who knows, if he had made it with his mother there, he might have regretted it. The audience felt the same: they went to the event, hoping to know more about the novel, but instead they ended up being forced to pry into a private business of how a mother has destroyed a son's life willingly and innocently.

I'm glad I'm not going to be a mother, gender-wise and attitude-wise. I know that I'm far too uncaring (and too sensitive at the same time) to be one. I hate to destroy people I love "innocently" and "with all good intentions". I wonder what the future will hold for these two sons but I wish them for the best. One piece of advice: get rid of your mom before it's too late!