Tag: mental-health

• Oppressively humid day – the air hot, still, and heaving with moisture. Took a shower to cool off, and within minutes of exiting the bathroom and getting dressed, I was coated with a thin film of sweat once more.

  Today was tinted with an inexplicable shade of melancholy, an anonymous heaviness bearing down upon me for most of the afternoon. Mercifully, I can’t remember the last time I had an episode like this. In the few weeks after giving birth I was quite a weepy mess, but I suppose that can easily be explained by hormones rushing all through me in every direction. Some years ago I was quite regularly plagued by moments of despair that, like today’s, seemed to strike for no rhyme or reason. If you’re poetic, you could call it melancholy. If you’re pragmatic, you might call it undiagnosed depressive episodes. It’s embarrassing, but a lot of the gloom and misery that churned in my gut were caused by an intense fear of being left behind in life; everywhere I looked, my peers were settling down, having families, and, well, moving. There was much I enjoyed about my singleness and its freedoms, but I often felt intensely alone too. I am well aware that to other single friends, I am probably now that person who ‘has their life together’, and I remind myself to try to be as considerate and thoughtful towards them as possible, since I know how isolating it can feel.

  Rolling around on the bed today, my ten month old prised a hair velcro off my head and managed to stow it away amongst the sheets, refusing to tell me where even after I harassed her for it. Later in the day she also managed to get her hands on my butterfly clip and wasted no time in absconding with it. This time I managed to catch her as she released it into the chasm between the mattress and the bed frame, and when she looked away I hurriedly fished it out and reinstated it on my head.

  Trump’s State of the Union address is playing on the TV outside and bits keep wafting in, bringing with them a strong sense of dystopia and the cloying scent of delusion.

  Goodnight!

  25th Feb 2026

  family, life, lifestyle, mental-health, motherhood, singapore, writing

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• getting on with time off

  Having taken a year off, I frequently get asked what I intend to get up to with all this time on my hands. The question frustrates me a little because while I’m off work, my days aren’t exactly devoted to leisure. There actually isn’t a great deal one can get up to while concurrently functioning as a 24/7 security camera and safety net for a small, fragile creature who spends most of her waking hours trying to wobble into a sitting or standing position, and who finds irresistible any piece of furniture with a surface her hands can reach – which of course perfectly overlaps with the sort of furniture that she can fall and bump some part of her head on. Case in point: I found her the cutest low table and chair. J assembled it this afternoon and placed it in the middle of her play mat. She crawled over at top speed to investigate, was delighted, and promptly slipped from the chair and hit her mouth on the edge of the table, sustaining a small cut.

  So all this is to say that, basically, I’m kind of at work, just that my boss is small, pre-verbal, and shits herself. I enjoy it – there is nothing quite as gratifying as lying in the middle of the play mat while she uses me as a soft play area, her personal Everest – but I do sometimes lie in bed at the end of the day lamenting the absence of anything particularly accomplished. I’m freed from enacting constant surveillance in the 2.5h or so in the day when she naps, but in these periods I am so weakly compelled to do anything besides watching ASMR vlogs on TV.

  Things I should probably get up to:

  1. Get my driving license. It’s been on my agenda since I turned 18, and back then Gangnam Style was still at the height of its popularity.
  2. Make more art. I’ve seriously considered reopening my small commission-based art gig, where I do drawings of people’s pets. I ran it for about a year sometime back and the income, while insignificant, was enough to cover some cab rides and overpriced coffees.
  3. Write!! I should really submit something, anything, to someone, anyone, this year. Short story ideas toss around in my head pretty much all the time, and if I commit to sitting down and finally typing them out I’m sure I’ll have something. Not a winner, perhaps, but at least a worthy competitor. I should also write more right here to keep the practice alive. I’ve discovered that the most effective way to maintain a blogging habit is to write whatever comes to mind when I open my laptop, rather than ‘saving up’ topics of interest that are too tedious to recall in the pockets of time I do devote to writing here.

  Things I have in fact been getting up to:

  1. Going to the market every morning, which has long been a dream of mind. I’m a big fan of buying groceries to cook daily (rather than storing up from a one-time-good-one shop run) and very much enjoy the more human touch you get at the wet market as compared with the cold, big-corp feel of a supermarket. I bring the baby along, which is nice as a morning activity but in her case I do actively try and avoid the human touch, which is difficult as the shoppers are mostly elderly folk who are attracted to babies like moths to a flame.
  2. Making pressure cooker Big Soups with whatever spoils we harvest from the market. Delicious. Healthy. Much joy.
  3. Observing my baby top to toe, minute to hour to day to week to month. She’s so fun to watch, it’s like being completely mesmerised by a firefly bopping around in a jar (a metaphor I hope is used only by the observer and not the subject …). She has been doing the funniest little bit where she pulls to sit, then immediately claps for herself. Yes little honey be proud!! So are we!!! Clap clap clap clap clap for you.

  At barre today I ran into an acquaintance who’d recently suffered a late-term miscarriage. Equal parts sad and awkward, which culminated in me saying ‘sorry for your loss’ while bowing. Mortifying behaviour, and even more cringey to recall. I think it’s an unfortunate leftover habit from the many years I spent in a Chinese school, where 90 degree bows to teachers were the norm. Nowadays I can barely wrangle eye contact from students who breeze past me in the corridors and stairways of school. Not sure if I should get with the times or wallow in despair for the next generation.

  Oh, another thing I’ve started with this ‘free year’ and am already struggling to maintain: 6am runs with J. We kept it up for 6 days straight, then had to enforce a hiatus because I went for my first pilates class in years and my body promptly said ‘nope’ and went into hysterics for two days. We’ve been spottily trying to get back on it, with some success, but we really should keep going. At 6, both our alarms start to chime and tingle. I hear mine and turn it off, but also shut my eyes immediately and continue fusing with my pillow. Can I return to sleep? No. J doesn’t hear his own alarm, which seems to be at either a decibel or tone that completely escapes his ear drums. It rings. For an age. My eyes flicker open with difficulty. I flail an arm at whatever exposed skin of his I can see in the darkness. He spasms. He rolls over. He turns his alarm off. We are now both semi-awake but continue lying silently beside each other.

  Then it’s 730am and I say ‘I went back to sleep because you went back to sleep’ and he says ‘no I went back to sleep because you didn’t wake up’ and we plod along through the day and the cycle repeats itself in 24 hours.

  Well, must remain optimistic, though the trickle of hope I sip from is fast drying up as this late hour marches past 11pm and slides toward midnight. Goodnight world!

  3rd Feb 2026

  baby, family, life, lifestyle, love, mental-health, motherhood, singapore, writing

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• a frightened little thing

  I’m sitting at the dining table waiting for my baby to finish crying and drift off to sleep for her nap. I’ve got a half-eaten plate of fruits and Bon Iver playing in the background and as I scroll listlessly through Instagram I happen upon a comic about being in the car with a parent through the years, a short but wrenching comic about love and loss and dreams and sacrifice and the stupid things we do when we don’t know what to do with the unnameable feelings that knock around inside us like mints in a box. And the next thing I know I’m sobbing and my face is drenched with tears and oh? The baby’s stopp ed crying.

  The sadness got me thinking again about an idea and image that’s been brewing inside of me – that love is a fearful little thing. I think we tend to think about love as a gushing river, wide and full and honest and true, but increasingly I feel like love is less like the waters and more like the little fish that gather in the still, silty little pools by the shore, frightened and flighty and powerless against the torrents beyond. It’s fear of losing them that makes me lash out at my parents when they make questionable life choices or don’t take enough care of themselves. It’s the terror when I zoom in on the baby monitor and think I don’t see her breathing. The fist tightening around my heart when I see my husband shut off because I’m being careless with the mints in my box, laying brick after invisible brick till his fortress is impregnable.

  The little fish, I keep seeing them in my mind. They are a boring brown and have anxious, doleful eyes and little fins that flap relentlessly to stay in the same spot. When did love and fear become two sides of the same coin? Perhaps it has always been the case and I just never looked carefully enough at the coins when it was time to pay up.

  7th Nov 2025

  family, life, love, mental-health, relationships, writing

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• little thing

  ‘How does it feel to be a parent?’

  ‘Not very different, for now. It feels like a truncated experience because the nanny is doing so much.’

  ‘Chores and duties aside, do you feel fundamentally changed as a person?’

  (thinks) ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Would you take a bullet for her? I know the correct answer is yes, but deep down, how does it actually feel?’

  (thinks) ‘I’m not sure yet either. I think yes … but I’m not fully sure.’

  I don’t know if I would, either. People describe motherhood as this instant gush of mothering instinct and I-Would-Die-For-You mother’s love at the first sight of the little thing that just exited your body, slimy and wrinkled and pink. While I do love her, and she is undeniably very cute, she still feels foreign. Like she could be anybody’s baby; nothing feels proprietary (yet). Perhaps like all human relationships, this one, too, will take time. Maybe the motherhood experience is different for everyone – but of course it is, I’m just unacquainted with the normal extent of deviation. Is anything normal? Life in the past 12 days have been about timings and schedules and right breast and left breast and how many days has it been since she pooped and which formula brand is better and what’s this funny spot on her little face? I am tempted to flow with my instinct, but have to admit that when it comes to caring for the little thing, I actually have close to none. Mothering doesn’t feels instinctual, or human nature; it feels like a set of skills to be learnt, knowledge to amass, habits to build. When my cluelessness feels overwhelming, I remind myself that she, too, is learning – learning things as basic as how to do a poo. It’s humbling to think that I myself was once so new to life that something that feels so natural now, like dropping a poo, had to be learnt. Likewise, I hope what feels like an insurmountable curriculum now will one day become second nature.

  Perhaps my problem is a need to optimize motherhood. I’d been reading Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’, of which my favourite of the anthology is the essay ‘Always be Optimizing’. The essay revolves around the rise of Barre and athleisure in the US, positioned against the evolving face of feminism and, correspondingly, the newly insidious ways that society dictates how women should act, look and be. But the root of the problem, she suggests, is the need to optimize the female experience. And maybe I’m doing the same thing here with motherhood. I do feel the need to do things right, and to get them right quick. I take it as a personal insult that the baby cries in my arms, but is soothed the moment the confinement nanny takes over. I get frustrated easily when the latch falls through. I despair at the way the hours shoot by every day of confinement, making me feel like I’ve done and accomplished nothing except constant breastfeeding and sitting through many, many Youtube videos.

  The thing that’s really killing me, though, is not the crying, or the sore nipples, or the night feeds. It’s the sheer monotony of confinement. Each day blends seamlessly into the next (thanks to the night feeds) and it feels like a groundhog day situation where I do the same things, eat the same foods, and spend the hours between feeling hot and sweaty because of the sheer amount of heat piled up in my system.

  There are moments of reprieve, and tenderness. Today I looked at her suckling and thought about how she will never be two weeks old again. This is it, the here and now. She’s growing by about 200g each week, mad! Then there’s the little singsong sounds she makes while nursing, or the way she sporadically breaks into a small smile. Moments like this make me feel a little better.

  Well, I suppose there’s no alternative now but to dive head in. Wish me all the best!

  7th May 2025

  family, life, mental-health, motherhood, parenting

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