Reflection

MM Lee has been on my mind this week. It has been more than 20 days since his wife passed away and the public spotlight is no longer on him. No more public scrutiny of his grief, his stoicism, his pain. And I feel drawn to pray for him.

He is a man I have admired for a long time. J laughs at me for this, but despite all the criticism I have heard, read and voiced myself, at the end of it all, I would still say I admire him. While I have long admired his political acumen, decisiveness, foresight and high standards, events in recent months have revealed a more personal side to him and I have come to respect him not just as a political leader but as a husband.

Ken says I should not hold LKY as a standard to measure men. He thinks LKY set too high standards that other men cannot measure up to. But I am tempted to ask, why not? LKY is right to say "Don't judge a man until the coffin has been closed on him". No one is perfect. But as men go, I think LKY is someone who has lived right. He may not always have done right, but it is very hard to say what decisions we ourselves might have made in the heat of political battle.

Yet as his life winds down, I feel I like him even more. His recent interview touched me in its honesty, humility and doggedness. What touched me most of all was his devotion to his wife. How many men will sit by the bedside of their comatose wife and read her poems she loved? To me, just this one act of love redeems him. And the opening line of the ST article on Mrs Lee's funeral said it all - "In the end there was just a man who loved his wife till the end." That's it.

A Pearl

Writing is good therapy. Most times it works. Some days I can't. I seem to have entered a tunnel period. Maybe it is a phase. Maybe it is hormonal. Maybe it is a natural consequence. Whatever it is, I decided I would come write in my blog to distract myself. And to share a quote I found:

"A pearl is a beautiful thing that is produced by an injured life. It is the tear that results from the injury of the oyster. The treasure of our being in this world is also produced by an injured life. If we had not been wounded, if we had not been injured, then we will not produce the pearl." (Stephen Hoeller).

I feel encouraged by this thought. It gives meaning to an emotional state. And a hope that something beautiful will yet come out of all this.

I am Consumed

AAAAAGH!!!! My portfolio has taken over my life. I have stuff I want to blog about but I have been devoting every spare hour to the portfolio! It is a monster that refuses to be sated. It is a whiny 2 year old that wants more, more, more. It is a naggy old lady who sits in a corner of my mind and says in a quavery voice "Isn't there more you could do? Are you sure you are done? What about..."

I am putting together this portfolio for a job I am applying for. And I have to compile evidence from my work life to show that I have met 5 Standards like 'Leading in Professional Development" or 'Contributing to School and Nation" and my least favourite one "Leading in Professional Ethos". Everyone I speak to says "of course you can do it" or "surely you have enough stuff to show" and I too think I do BUT the trick you see, is not in simply collecting evidence but in putting things together coherently, stitching it all together so the portfolio tells the story of my teaching career. And of course I am a perfectionist and in my eyes, I never seem to have done enough.

Other than this internal struggle, I also am contending with external factors such as office work that still needs to be done, of course, and office printers that do not work! The latter really gets my goat because these printers have apparently not been working for a while. But instead of reporting the malfunctioning printer(s), I think people have just switched to using other available printers. So when I reported one printer and the IT guy came to fix it he couldn't connect me to any other working printer because one after another of the printers he connected me to ended up not working :) Poor guy - what he thought was a routine 15 minute job ended up taking him 3 hrs!

Anyway, here I am, working on my portfolio again. I had Session #3 of my root canal this morning so I have the day off. I really want to get this portfolio done by tomorrow. I wish I had a PA who knew what needed to be done so I could just say "Print that document, tag and file" and it would be done :) I hope this job (if I get it) turns out to be worth all of this :)

Thinking

Hmmm... I wonder if I should give my blog a new skin or a makeover of some sort to celebrate her birthday. Yes, my blog is a "she". What else would it be?

Happy Birthday Blog!

Today is the fifth birthday of my blog. Yes, my first entry was on 5 Oct 2005 and today my blog is 5 years old. I spent a while thinking whether I should celebrate this date as an anniversary or as a birthday. But since a birthday is the specific celebration of a birth and an anniversary is a celebration of any event at all, I settled for a 'birthday' :)

I started this blog the year J went off to the US to study. It was a milestone event for me, my first-born leaving home to live on her own, without maternal supervision, may I add, in a foreign country. It was a hard time for me, a time of a great deal of anxiety about how she would cope, if she would make friends, how would she cope with winter, would she eat properly, what if she fell ill... The list was endless. As it turned out, she coped very well. Made new friends, broke a toe, kept crazy hours, loved her classes and started dating. During those years, this blog was a way for me to keep in touch with her, to tell her what was on my mind, what was going on at home. And she began a blog as well and until she tired of it, the blog was a great way for me to keep in touch with her life in the US.

My blog was also a way for me to share myself with my daughters. R was in secondary school and in a super-secretive phase when mum was an intrusion. An 'empty nest' was becoming a reality for me with 2 daughters quite absorbed in their own activities, and for some strange reason, I began to worry whether I had done all I could before I released my daughters into the big bad world. There seemed to be so many life lessons I had not shared. So I started this blog as a way for me to open conversations, to share who I was, to give advice without my girls rolling their eyes :)

But soon, I got caught up in my own blog. I began to enjoy writing for myself, not only for my daughters. It became the place where I could muse out aloud and I found that writing helped to crystallise my thoughts, to understand how I had changed, who I had become. Writing in this blog also strengthened my faith as I sorted out what I believed and why I believed what I believed. I gave thanks on this blog and shared my faith journey. It has also become a repository of memories - of holidays, of times spent with good friends, of family times.

My blog has also been the means by which I made new connections. I met new people - Jonathan who read my blog while he was in Australia and then commented on a blog entry and 2 girls in the US whose blogs I commented on. I was also contacted by a blog writer based in the US who writes on midlife issues who asked if she could link my blog to hers. And of course, my posts on this blog became the basis for the series on dating that I am currently writing for Seasons of Life, a publication of my home church.

So here I am, reflecting on my blog and how far I have come in these last 5 years. Much has changed in my life. J is back but R is away but unlike J, she hardly reads my blog. She doesn't even read her own :) I was in my 40s when I started and now I have entered the 50s... I am in a hard place now but there have been good times too and when I re-read my blog entries I realise I have much to be thankful for. So "Happy Birthday TreeByTheStream"!

And hey, if you read my blog, will you stop to say "Happy Birthday" too? And if you enjoy reading it or have been blessed by it or you have anything at all to say about it, will you comment? And if you don't have a Google account and can only post as 'Anonymous' please leave your name so I know whom I am thanking for stopping by :)