It’s funny how
sometimes whatever it is that you’re doing or talking about leads you to think
about something else you’d rather not think about.
Like the time we were all gripped by
a particularly gruesome episode of ‘The Following’ involving two blood splattered
murderers making out in the shower and suddenly, it reminded Saffy that it was
her turn to clean the bathroom that weekend.
Recently, we were all watching
Hollywood Week on ‘American Idol’ and marveling at how weird some of the
contestants were.
“What’s with this hippie chick?” I
piped up. “She’s very strange.”
“What’s with her eyebrows?” Amanda
added.
“Wait, that’s a girl?” Saffy asked.
“Well, this is girls’ week, so I
guess that would make her a girl,” I said.
Saffy blinked. “Huh. I would never
have guessed.”
Eyebrows Chick was eventually booted
off though Saffy wished that she’d stayed longer for the novelty. “Really, I
never would have picked her out as a girl!”
“Can we talk about Mariah?” Amanda
interrupted.
“What about her?” Saffy said, reaching
for the bowl of salted popcorn.
“Is it me or has she put on some
weight?”
Saffy hit the pause button on the
TV. Three sets of eyeballs scrutinized Ms Carey.
“I can’t tell,” Saffy said
eventually. “I'm hypnotized by her boobs. They’re practically coming out at me
from the TV screen.”
Amanda pulled out her iPad and
looked up Mariah Carey on YouTube, and sure enough, there was a younger and
considerably thinner Mariah belting out ‘Hero’.
“My God, she’s half the size she is now! It’s like watching a different woman!”
Amanda breathed.
“I think it is a different woman!” Saffy said firmly, a comment that Amanda
later said demonstrated just how seriously flawed Saffy’s sense of gender
perception is.
Leave it to Sharyn to put things
into perspective.
“Aiyah!” she cried out the next day
in the middle of Golden Shoe when she met up with the girls for lunch. “That
video is like ten years old! Ten years ago, you also thin what!”
There was a pause as Saffy and
Amanda’s brains caught up with what Sharyn was actually saying.
Amanda dropped her spoon back into
her bowl of meepok. “Excuse me, but are you saying that I’m now fat?”
“No, I think she’s saying that we’re fat!” Saffy said helpfully.
Sharyn looked serenely unperturbed.
“And then she also give birth, leh? She got twins, right? You give birth to
twins, I see you still got thin or not!”
“I don’t see what that has to do
with anything,” Amanda said stiffly. “Heidi Klum has at least four kids and
she’s still walking around in her Victoria’s Secret lingerie!”
“You supermodel, is it?” Sharyn
said, looking owlishly at Amanda over the top of her thick glasses.
All of which then made me remember when
we were all growing up, my mother used to moan about how having us had
completely ruined her figure. “I used to have such a lovely thin waist,” she
would say as she watched Michelle try on a new dress in a shop. “Never have
children. The waist is the first thing to go.”
You never think of your parents as
being young and fun and slim once upon a time, long before you were born. They’ve
always just, well, mum and dad – getting older and greyer with each passing
year. Though in my mother’s case, she’s getting improbably younger and darker
with the help of a doctor or two and a crafty hairdresser who knows his L’Oreal
colour chart.
And increasingly, you mark the
passage of time not so much by your parents’ growing infirmity, but by the fact
that now when you look in the mirror, you suddenly spot a wrinkle around the
eyes that you could have sworn wasn’t there yesterday, or a touch of grey
creeping into once jet black hair.
My sister Michelle says when she was
a child, she so desperately wished she was all grown up like our parents. And
now, almost at the same age our parents were when they got married and had
their first child, she wouldn’t mind being a child again.
“I’d probably be a lot nicer, too,
to Mother,” she added the other day on Skype. “I don’t think I was an easy
child. It’s a wonder she never just packed up and walked away from it all.”
After she disconnected our call, she
booked a plane ticket back home as a surprise visit. Not to be outdone, Saffy
and Amanda called their mothers and
took them out to lunch.
And yes, we got all this from ‘American
Idol’ and Mariah Carey.
1 comment:
i think our parents are brave... they all were young once, then raised us up, and now has to cope with aging... yet us as children doesn't always realise they may now need us more than we need them.
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