“Even if she’s no beauty, dear God pls give her a good brain.”

who would’ve thought that an off-the-cuff, half-baked thought, in the middle of the night, typed out in the haze of slumber, in the confines of a text bar for 140 characters, would spark such controversy.

the scene: mother nursing her baby girl who was falling asleep in the comfort of a suckled bosom, her lids drooping heavily, drifting away to dreamland, sweet and innocent, right down to her tiny toenails.

looking at her, her big round head and funny-looking hair (what we call “mad scientist hair”, especially when it’s all wiry with sweat), her little button nose (in malay, you’d call it “pesek” or flat) and her perpetually drooling lips, her barely there eyebrows and lashes – the mother swells with nothing short of pride that this little being in her arm is “JUST SO CUTE!” that she repeats it like a broken record every day to her husband for affirmation, and receives it with a nod of agreement and a fatherly grin each time.

coz let’s face it, in every parent’s (very) biased world, their child/ren ARE the cutest.

but rationale being a bitch, they know that to say it out loud often enough to anyone else would appear presumptuous to the point of obnoxious.

and well, we wouldn’t want THAT, would we, now?

so mother downplays it.

yeah, baby doesn’t have curly locks of hair. she doesn’t have fluttery doll-like lashes. her nose isn’t sharp, neither is her chin. she doesn’t have a dimple in her cheek. and so, through absolutely no fault on her part, she has little of the features associated with your quintessential beauty.

which is all well and fine, coz that’s all part of your DNA, baby. god knows mummy herself looked funny as a baby (with pictures to prove).

the thing that really matters, is that she is adorable to me, to no end. couldn’t you guess from the infinite number of photos and anecdotes streamed through our various platforms of communication?

but at this point, and mostly in the future, it is a mother’s utmost wish that this girl will worry little about the superficial, and hone her more worthy God-given faculty of the mind and intelligence, to make the right choices and decisions, to better herself and acquire everything she will ever need in life through that. as PCK would say, though in quite a different context, “use your blain!”

and all that, my friends, was what mother meant to convey, albeit pathetically, in a 140 character tweet. (yes, i over-think things, that’s my dysfunction. annoying as hell, i know.)

but if you even bothered reading between the lines in the first place, if you knew me well enough, as i would expect you, a non-stranger, to – you would never, EVER, for a moment think that i would intentionally ‘insult’ my child through a compressed one-liner to convey my innermost thoughts.

then again, i guess i never should’ve attempted in the first place, coz the fact that you think i’d even do such a thing, is an insult in itself.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Parenthood, Random Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.